It's Always You
by MapleFlavouredIce
Summary: It had all seemed so clear, back in Naples. Join the mafia, kill the Boss, stop the drug trade. Giorno had his ideas, and he had his expectations. Perhaps it was his fault for not expecting time travel, visitors from alternative dimensions, vampires... It seems that, unfortunately for Giorno, his path to becoming a Gang Star has become all that more complicated. Discord in profile!
1. Whenever it's early twilight

Full Summary: When Giorno joins the Italian mafia in the spring of 2001, he thinks that he has a fairly good idea of what to expect. What he does not expect is for a version of himself from a decade into the future to suddenly appear, and he does not expect to then get tangled in the plans of a priest hellbent on "achieving Heaven". What he does not expect is to find out that Dio Brando was a vampire from Victorian England who formed a cult to achieve world domination in the late 80's, and he does not expect to find out that this vampire threat, which was presumably solved before he reached the tender age of three, is somehow not as done and dusted as the Speedwagon Foundation thought. It seems that, unfortunately for Giorno, his path to becoming a Gang Star has become all that more complicated.

* * *

At twenty-six Giorno Giovanna does indeed have a legitimate driver's license. Long gone are the days of illegally driving across the Ponte della Libertà while under attack by an enemy stand. He is no longer fifteen, his car is not stolen, and he is not just outside of Venice. Venice, Florida, maybe. If he had the time and the inclination to drive to the other side of the state, of which he has neither. As it stands, he has business at the St. Lucie Catholic Church, not far from the Jensen Beach to Jupiter Inlet Aquatic Preserve, where he has been told Doctor Kujo works. Or, rather, business has come to him, as it so often does. The letter he received is currently crawling along his collar, a handsome _Olla v-nigrum Casey_. The ladybug is a glossy black that has two trapezoidal red spots on the top of its shell which is lined with a white trim. It is incredibly obvious when contrasted with his white blazer and pants, but never let it be said that Giorno was immune to the aesthetics of a lady beetle. The aesthetics of the area around the church, however, could not be described as one to which he was partial.

There are stretches of asphalt lined with cabbage palmettos and thatch palms, interspersed with large grass lawns. The houses are low, single-story affairs, lazily sprawled out between highways and golfing greens and various unnamed bodies of water. He thinks of the botanical gardens next to the St. Lucie River as he turns into the parking lot, which is another black plot of land.

What he sees is not the Viscuvato 'e Napule, but it is perhaps his fault for trying to superimpose what he knows over what he sees. Ah, but what a difference centuries can make when compared to decades. There has been no time to do the delicate task of restoration and rebuilding, of combining a facade in the neo-Gothic style with pre-existing Gothic structures, of transitioning from thirteenth century sensibilities to twentieth century proclivities. The _facciata a salienti_, which is to say that the roof of St. Lucie Church has been sloped in such a way that it reaches various different heights, all of which is done not in stone but with uniform white concrete. This architectural decision is more due to the church having clearly delineated sections of the building, rather than having a facade imitating that of the San Giovanni Laterano.

It's No. 1 that flies up to him when he steps out of the rental.

"Coast's clear, Boss!" The tiny stand informs him, mock salute and all.

He waves his fingers in acknowledgment. "Good. Keep the others on stand by." Another salute, and there is a blur of gold as No. 1 returns to his stand user. He can't see where Guido is, but that's par for the course for meetings like this. He appreciates the whiteness of the church as he walks to the high arched entrance, but thinks that his own pants and blazer combo are a cleaner white. He certainly pays enough to ensure that they are. He notes with no little distress that his heels sink slightly into the asphalt, and he hurries inside.

When No. 1 had said that the coast was clear, he had assumed that meant clear of stands, and not clear of any other human except for himself. Admittedly his experiences with churches outside the occasional mass (_very_ occasional) were limited, and his experience with American churches was even less, but he didn't think they got to be this empty midday. Or maybe they did? Regardless, it causes him to stop just inside the entrance.

"Hello?" He calls out, and Requiem buzzes just beneath his skin. His voice echoes, and beneath the sound he can hear the clack of footsteps. Wooden soles then.

He waits a moment, shifting his weight back and forth with the steps. Once he's confident that he's gotten the rhythm, he moves in time with the tread. He keeps himself light, on the balls of his feet, and only stops when the voice that responds seems particularly close.

"Apologies," he hears before the person rounds the corner, "I was deep in prayer."

"Then the apologies are all mine. I didn't mean to disturb you." The two of them look at each other, and he wonders what they see. Being a mortal constrained to his own flesh, Giorno is privy to his thoughts, and his thoughts alone. And Giorno knows what he sees. What he sees is a full collar cassock, black, and which has a gold cross spanning the chest and the full length of the person's figure. Their white hair is shorn, and their facial hair is bizarre, but not the worst he's ever seen.

"No, no," they say, turning to their side and sweeping a hand behind them towards the corridor they just emerged from, "after all, it was I who invited you here."

Giorno inclines his head, and then moves so that he will pass by close to this other person. "Father Pucci?" he asks, already knowing the answer.

Their lips tilt up, just barely, but they do indeed make an aborted attempt at a smile. "Please, call me Enrico," they say, not without a little humor.

"Enrico," he says, and he keeps his head tilted just enough that his ponytail spills over his shoulder, "lead the way." The look that he gets tells him that Enrico is wise to his ways, and he lightly shrugs his shoulders, but otherwise says and does nothing else.

"Normally it would be polite to introduce yourself at this point in the conversation."

"Oh, how rude of me." Giorno motions to Enrico's hand that is not stretched. They put it out, clearly anticipating a handshake. "Allow me to introduce myself to the person that has invited me here." He grabs their hand, but instead of shaking he brings their fingers up to his lips. He speaks above the skin of their knuckles. "Enrico, I am Giorno Giovanna. But I insist that you call me Giorno."

"If you insist."

"I do," and he lets go of Enrico's hand, who seems a hair slow in retrieving it.

"If you'll follow me…?" They take a step and Giorno follows, heels clicking out of time with Enrico's shoes.

"If I may be so bold, Enrico," Giorno says.

"What is it?"

"My associates could not find a preferred form of address."

"Ah," and there is no falter in their steps, "I am not exactly particular, but if I were to decide… it could be, ah, masculine or neutral." Giorno nods with the understanding of someone who is also burdened by a physical form of dubious qualities and gender.

Enrico catches the movement. "If I may be so bold, Giorno."

"But of course."

"My own information network has touched on the topic with regards to yourself."

"A priest with an information network! How wonderful. But yes, to answer the question that you haven't quite asked, I prefer the masculine, were I to phrase it like that. However, I find myself more and more detached from the notion as I get older." He waves a hand back and forth, as if wiping away the very idea of Giorno Giovanna being associated with gender, horrors above. Giorno uses the movement to pick up the ladybug on his collar. "This letter," he starts, turning the tiny beetle towards Enrico.

"While a beautiful specimen of the _Coccinellidae_ family, I'm afraid that is not my letter."

Giorno motions for Enrico's hand, which they provide with little hesitation. The lady beetle, by virtue of being a lady beetle, has no compunctions in crawling from Giorno's thumb to Enrico's palm. It does so happily, with seemingly little sense of direction or plan. It stops to use its legs to clean itself, and Giorno places a soft finger on its shell. Before them, it opens its tiny black wings, and paper bursts from out and under, shimmering like chitin and reshaping into a deceptively plain white envelope.

"Is this not your letter, Enrico?"

Enrico turns it over, and eases open the top flap. He looks inside, but otherwise does not disturb the contents. "Impressive. I had been told that you could create life, not that you could take life."

"I'm not taking anything that I didn't give." The two of them make it to a side room, and Enrico holds the door open. The room must be Enrico's… office. If priests have offices. Which is knowledge to which Giorno is not privy. The room is plain in the sense of decoration that would identify the owner. There is religious iconography to be sure, but no extraneous photos or knick knacks on the desk, no jacket or clothes slung over the backs of the chairs, no personal books or reading material on the shelves. Disappointingly sterile.

"And besides," Giorno says while fully stepping into the room and out of his blazer, "what would it be like to live a life constantly chained to your creator's side?" He had, of course, kept his square-cut blazer buttoned closed specifically for the moment when he could take it off. The whiteness of the blazer did much to hide the sheerness of his blouse, which was one of his favorite pieces. The collar and the buttoned placket are a solid white, and his skinny tie of the same shade hangs almost perfectly down the center of his torso. Both the tie and blouse are tucked into his pants. He'd opted not to wear his piercings earlier in the morning, and had consoled himself by wearing the Anja d'Orsay pumps in white leather with the covered set-back stiletto heels and the adjustable ankle straps. His high rise cigarette pants, also an immaculate white, taper just above the ankle straps. He puts his hands lightly into his pockets to stave off the sense of awkwardness that still creeps up in the back of his mind, even after all these years.

Enrico's eyes don't so much as twitch downwards. For a brief, dizzying moment Giorno almost wants to shake his chest to get a reaction. It's not often that he's ignored when it comes to his sartorial choices, and even less when he decides that his nipples will play a part in accessorizing his outfit.

His disappointment must somehow show, because Enrico says, "I tripped over your father while he was laying in the pews, and his top would perhaps best be described as a collection of tattered fabric masquerading as a shirt." They gesture broadly at Giorno. "Which is to say, I've seen much more skin." They say this with a genial smile, and Giorno lets the comparison roll off of him without so much as a consideration.

"That's quite a thing to admit, especially for a priest."

Enrico's smile neither changes nor deepens, but Giorno imagines that he sees it twitch all the same. "In the interest of being honest then," and Giorno would snort were he given the chance, "I must admit that he also used to lie with me on bed, very often with no shirt."

"Well," Giorno says with a pause. "When I received the letter, I was not expecting to meet one of my father's lovers."

"Lover?" Enrico sits across from Giorno, folding their hands in their lap, envelope under their hands. "Not quite."

Giorno sits down as well, crossing one leg over the other. "Ah," he says, adding no qualification.

"Ah?"

"I believe I understand. Is this a case of…" A pause. "I won't ask if you would prefer I not."

Enrico shakes their head. "The past is the past. Ask what you will."

"I can be close to someone without a sort of, say, directed desire. If you will forgive my phrasing, but it's like a desire to be with, but not a desire to act. Or maybe it is something where being close is enough. There is the intimacy of the knowing, but there is no need for the intimacy of the body. Of the body in a certain way, I mean."

Enrico's gaze is keen when it meets Giorno's. "To be a lover is more than to just or only know the body in a certain way."

"There is more than one way to be," Giorno pauses, searching for a suitable word but finding none, "intimate."

"If we are working with this definition… then yes, I was a lover of DIO. I loved him as I love God."

"You loved him as you love God? I was thinking more of something between two people."

Enrico puts a hand up. "We can discuss this at a later time, if you so desire. But for now I believe you are here because of my letter."

"Yes, the letter." Giorno looks at it on Enrico's lap. "You seemed quite confident that the Speedwagon Foundation is a threat to me and mine."

"Because they are." Enrico says without so much as a qualification of his statement. Giorno would shift in his seat had he not been in more uncomfortable conversations before.

"And your evidence?"

"Tomorrow, during your meeting with the Speedwagon Foundation, you will be accused of having faked your cooperation with them for all these years, and that you have found a way to manufacture Stone Masks. This is, apparently, all in service of your plan to use vampires to bolster the ranks of the Italian mafia, and incidentally is also why you continue to refuse to turn over The Arrow. You've been quite busy, Giorno. An army of vampire stand users?"

Giorno spreads out his hands. "A wonderful story, but a story nonetheless."

"Yes," Enrico gets up and goes around their desk, which is a rectangular affair of light colored wood and no other defining characteristics. From one of the drawers he produces a manilla envelope that is fit to burst. And then Enrico comes to Giorno's side, and they place a hand on Giorno's shoulder while holding the envelope out. The sensation of their palm through chiffon is not one that Giorno can say that he dislikes. "There are internal memos, telephone call transcripts, meeting minutes, formal documents," Enrico pulls slightly closer to Giorno, and brings their faces together so that they can maintain eye contact, "all about your plans of world domination."

Giorno makes an effort to meet their gaze, instead of focusing on the space between their eyes. Enrico's eyes are dark and deep, and their lashes are a thick white.

"There is no time for me to confirm this information."

"My apologies. Had I been able to, I would have sent this to you. But I needed to be sure that it would reach you."

"Assuming that I believe you," and Giorno can see a slight crinkling at the corners of Enrico's eyes, "do they have plans to subdue me?" Perhaps to the point of cliché, Enrico's eyes remind Giorno of the open ocean.

"Enrico," he says when he gets no answer. "What have they planned?"

"There is only one reason why Kujo agreed to meet you."

Back at his office, Jotaro Kujo's file is impressive. And the Speedwagon Foundation's security is a joke. Giorno has known everything that the SPW knows since they first approached him shortly after his ascension to power. He has also kept his own people on Kujo Duty, on the off-chance the man ever decides to get rid of the blight of the Brando line in the Joestar legacy. They have never met once, and Kujo has seemingly never made any effort to approach Giorno. And Giorno has treated him much the same way. As Giorno understands it, Kujo has let his Time Stop ability weaken over the years, and is nowhere near as strong as he was at seventeen. In terms of active threats to Giorno's person, Kujo hasn't even been close to the top fifty for a good several years.

"From your… information network," Enrico nods their head slightly at Giorno's words, "what will be the trigger? The hypothetical final nail in my coffin?"

"Depending on the course of the conversation, they intend to assess your threat level."

"My threat level has been high for a number of years. I can't see how that must have changed recently."

Enrico pulls away, and Giorno is internally thankful that he no longer has to maintain such close eye contact. Enrico settles into the same position that they had before getting up.

"There are concerns about the number of masks that you've reported finding. They believe it is a diversion to hide the fact that you are creating them, and that you are merely providing them with the broken remains of your failed experiments."

Ludicrous. Absolutely ludicrous. The lunacy of these people. For a moment he doesn't know how to react, save for the disbelief that fills him. He has much more important things to focus on than this waste of time of being accused of engineering some sort of global vampire take-over. He wants to play with his hair, or bite his nails, or rub at his brows, but he suppresses all those desires and instead focuses on where Enrico has loosely folded their hands in their lap.

"If they're trying to get into Italy, I suppose it wouldn't kill me to let them in. At least, not without an escort. Escorts. Permanently. For the entire duration of their stay. Which will only last so long as to allow them to investigate the sites where we've found the masks."

Once again, there is a pause. And Giorno looks from Enrico's hands to Enrico's eyes. To Giorno, those wrinkles have not changed, nor have they deepened. "Enrico," Giorno says, and he watches those eyes for any shift, but gets no satisfaction. "What do they want?"

There is quiet, and not even the sound of the ticking of a clock. Giorno thinks of being fifteen, and on the train, and of the first time Bruno sat across from him. When he clenches his hand, the only wetness he feels is from his own palms. He has a terrible feeling that he knows what the SPW wants.

"What do they want to use it for?"

Enrico tilts their head to the side, and does not break the eye contact. "Were you born with your stand, Giorno?"

"What does your information network tell you?"

"That, at fifteen, you underwent a dramatic change in appearance, and that it was also around this time that you manifested your stand."

"I have had the _ability_ for quite a bit longer." Enrico makes an interested hum. "As a young child I used it subconsciously, and apparently just the desire was enough."

"DIO had The World," it is Giorno's turn to make a nose of acknowledgment, "and you more than likely manifested Gold Experience at the same time. Of course," and now Enrico's face changes, rapidly, with almost startling emotion, and his smile is unbearably bitter, "you are not the only one to have manifested their stand at that time."

Giorno is aware of the legacy of the star on his shoulder, but he cares very little for it. Each member of the Joestar clan occupies a folder in his office, but that is perhaps the sum total of the energy that he has expended on them. Instead, he thinks of Trish. And then he remembers that she is currently on tour in the US. Where, he isn't sure, but the distance is no insurmountable obstacle.

"It seems that stands very often follow the family line." It feels like a throwaway observation, but it causes Enrico to become a flurry of movement. They stand up and seemingly blow past Giorno in the same motion, and they pace restlessly by going back and forth between the chairs and the desk. Giorno can feel the breeze generated by their body with each pass, and sometimes Enrico's cassock brushes against Giorno. "I didn't realize that was such a controversial statement," he says, turning around in his seat to better watch Enrico. He thinks that he can hear them listing numbers under their breath, but he has always been terrible with numbers in foreign languages.

"Stands can be a result of consanguinity, yes," Enrico says while on their circuit around the room. For some time, it is the only thing they say.

"And…?" Giorno prompts.

Still in motion, Enrico speaks. "The key component is the strength of character, the Will." Giorno nods, and thinks that he will call Trish later in the evening, when he gets a moment. It really has been too long. "There are few that can survive the manifestation in their prime. There are even fewer that can survive it as a child, especially one as young as you were."

"Surely I have not been the only one to manifest that young."

Enrico shakes their head. "Not the only one, no." Giorno hears a _but_, and never actually gets to hear it. Instead, Enrico comes to his side, and their body seems to vibrate with energy. "Giorno," they say with an excited sort of breathlessness, "why did you come here?"

"To Florida?"

"Yes."

"Because the SPW contacted me. And they said that it was urgent. It's a relatively light week for me." Giorno shrugs his shoulders. "Comparatively, at least."

"Was there nothing else driving you here? Nothing else calling to you?"

Giorno thinks for a moment. "No. And besides, even if there was something calling me, I would not allow myself to be led." _And Requiem would prevent the interference_, he thinks, but does not say.

"Are you aware that you have brothers?"

Giorno searches what he knows, but comes up blank. "You're not referring to some dubious connection to the Joestars, are you?"

"Brothers through DIO."

"I suppose it would make sense that there are more of us, but I've never felt compelled to look."

"Would you have come to me, had I not sent the letter?"

"More than likely no."

"Your brothers," Enrico gestures broadly while recommencing their circuit around the room, this time at a more sedate pace, "will feel the compulsion. After the creation of C-Moon." The words, spoken with the gravity of importance, mean nothing to Giorno. Enrico comes to a stop behind their desk, and puts both hands on its unremarkable surface, palms face down. "They are daft, and they are cowards, and it will not be until I can shepherd them that they will realize their potential. And even then…"

"If they do indeed come and find you, as you say, then where are they now?"

"Why? Do you wish to meet them?"

"No," Giorno shakes his head. "Idle, pointless curiosity. Don't think that I haven't noticed how casually you've circuitously avoided my questions, much in the same fashion as you've travelled around this room." Giorno echoes his words by using his pointer finger to ever so helpfully make several circles in the air, directed towards Father Pucci themself. Giorno stands, and mirrors Enrico's pose on the other side of the desk. Yet again he notes that Enrico's eyes don't leave his. Terrible. Maybe he should have worn the piercings.

"_Basta_," he says with more clarity and purpose than he feels. He could get lost speaking to Enrico about everything and nothing. "The Speedwagon Foundation has called me over to determine how best to stop me and my vampire stand user empire from escaping Italy. They also wish to acquire The Arrow, and they've somehow strong-armed Kujo into meeting me, despite his obvious reluctance to do so. Is that everything?"

"Not quite."

Giorno lets himself frown, but does not speak.

"Before I tell you, allow me just one more question."

"Ask it."

"Is there not even the faintest compulsion that you feel?"

"Enrico." Giorno thinks that he has finally understood what Enrico is looking for, and he feels no pity. Just that deep chasm, in which he knows he can easily get lost. He thinks of being fifteen again, and he knows that Enrico was not much older when they first met Dio. He worries that were he to look too closely he would find himself in the figure before him, and he's spent too many years burying to be able to do the reverse and not have it hurt. "Enrico," he repeats. His voice sounds too soft to his own ears. "I find myself attracted to you, but perhaps not in the way that you are searching for."

"In any case," they look down, and it is only to search the grain of the wooden table for something that only they can see, "Kujo will not be a problem."

_What have you done?_ Is on the tip of Giorno's tongue, but he holds it. Instead he says, "You are more than welcome to come to Italy." Enrico does not look up. "I understand that you have work to do, and I won't be the one to keep you from it, but maybe, after you are finished, you can come over."

Enrico looks back up. Their eyes still remind Giorno of the open sea. "Thank you, Giorno, for the offer. Perhaps, when this is all done…" they trail off.

"When this is all done," Giorno agrees.

"Let me show you out then, if our business has concluded." Giorno nods and reaches for his blazer. Enrico smiles, walks around the desk, and then holds the door open. Giorno follows.

"And please," Giorno says as he crosses the threshold of the door, "don't be a stranger."

"Of course." The two of them leave the room together, but Giorno leaves the church alone.

* * *

"Sorry boys," says Trish's voice through the phone's speaker, "but I'm on the West Coast right now." Guido groans from inside the room, where he's gone to grab a bucket of ice for their wine. They'd done the American thing and ordered take out Italian food from a nearby restaurant, and gone to a liquor store to ask for recommendations. They'd ended up with a Pinot Noir 2001 from Oregon, assured of its quality. And they'd figured, when in Rome and all that.

Giorno unpacks their food out on the tiny table on their balcony, and they have a delightful collection of garlic knots, fried calamari and a side container of marinara, an order of vegetarian lasagna with mushrooms and zucchini, and the restaurant's version of eggplant parmigiana. It seems like too much to Giorno, but he knows that finishing it will be no problem for Guido and Sex Pistols. Already though, Giorno does not feel very hungry. He wishes the hotel room offered more than a machine for American coffee. Guido comes out with the bucket and two glasses, and directs his words to the phone.

"Trish! How are you?"

"Guido! I'm doing very well. How about you two?"

Guido laughs, and his face is wonderfully open, his voice full and loud. "Pretty good, just taking care of some business, you know how it is."

"And Giorno?" At his name he smiles, but he has no opportunity to speak.

"Oh, he's just pouting because he wasn't able to seduce a priest with his tits."

"Guido!" Giorno scolds.

"Giorno!" Trish says with a shocked gasp.

"I was _not_ trying to seduce Enrico."

"Then why'd you wear the see-through shirt?" Guido asks with an accusatory finger.

"It's sheer."

"Giorno, is it the Saint Laurent one?" Trish asks from the phone.

"Yes." He turns away from Guido with crossed arms, looking over the balcony.

"Ooooh Trish, he's angry with me."

"Giorno, I will forget all about you trying to seduce a priest with a sheer blouse if you promise to buy me one. Or several. In different colors."

"See," Giorno turns back to the table, "this is why I love Trish more. What colors would you like?"

Trish laughs, delighted. "You got it in white, didn't you? Do you think they have it in pink?"

"I'm sure they could make it in pink."

"Excellent! Thank you so much Giorno."

"Hey," Guido chimes in, "what about me?"

"Would you like a sheer pink blouse too?" Trish teases.

Giorno clicks his tongue. "Of course Guido, we haven't forgotten you. I'll buy you some god awful pants. What will it be? Some new animal print?"

"What about snakeskin?"

Giorno gives Guido a look from the corners of his eyes. "If that's what you'd like." He opens the wine bottle while still giving Guido The Look. He turns the cork into a tiny vine snake that wraps itself around his arm, and he kisses its head and murmurs to it lovingly under his breath.

"Ok, ok, ok. Point made Boss. No snakeskin."

Trish snorts, and the phone distorts the sound slightly. "Did he just turn something into a snake? Giorno, are you kissing a snake right now?" Giorno makes exaggerated kissing noises in response. "I'll take that as a yes."

"Her name is Tagliatella," Giorno announces amidst his kisses to Tagliatella's head, and she bears it with the grace that all of Giorno's creations seem to possess.

"And what does Tagliatella look like?"

Guido is the one that answers Trish first. "It's some green, wiggly, vine-y string-bean kind of thing." Guido's description twists Giorno's face into a moue of disagreement.

"Don't listen to him, Trish. Tagliatella is truly an exceptional example of her species. Her scales shine like finely-polished emeralds, her eyes are profound, her face bellies her deep wisdom—"

"Gior-no!" Sex Pistols whine from where they've burst forth from Guido and have begun to buzz around the table.

"I'm hungry," No. 5 says in its most downtrodden voice.

"Very well," Giorno acquiesces, and Tagliatella returns to her former occupation of being a cork. "I suppose I've kept you waiting long enough." Sex Pistols cheer in unison and immediately descend upon an unfortunate garlic knot. Guido pours them both a generous amount of wine.

"What are you boys eating?"

"Only Florida's finest!" Guido holds his glass in salute. "Take-out American-Italian food."

"Cin cin!" They clink their glasses and Trish echoes them from the speaker of the phone. The wine has an earthy aroma that is loaded with a fruitiness underneath, and Giorno is grateful that they had followed the suggestion. Unfortunately, Giorno finds himself with little appetite. The food verges on too heavy and too sweet. The calamari, although fried, settles in his stomach fine, and he squeezes a generous amount of lemon and avoids the marinara. Guido and Sex Pistols seem to have no trouble with the fare.

"Trish," Giorno says in between bites of the calamari, "are you eating?"

Her response is a short laugh, the kind that Giorno hears whenever she's been asked where she gets her looks from. He would have sloshed his wine out of his glass from his jerk towards the phone, had he not already taken a significant few drinks. "Trish," he says with a touch more urgency, "are you alright?"

Her sigh is audible. "Just tired, Giorno. No need to worry." His hand is already cradling the phone close to his face, and his chair scrapes against the wood of the balcony. "It's just been a long day."

"If you need anything at all," he starts, but does not finish.

"Yes, yes. I'll call you if I need to." Giorno moves around the table to come to Guido's side, who's stopped his quest to finish the eggplant to watch the phone. Giorno hands it to Guido.

"Come on Trish. What's the problem?"

"See, this is why I didn't mention being tired. I knew you'd both just worry yourselves over nothing. I really need to get back to work, but I promise I'm fine. Just get back to dinner, ok?" They hear the dial tone before either of them can respond, and Guido gives it back to Giorno. Giorno brings his other hand to hold Guido's and the phone between his and looks down the table.

"Should we not check on her? Or are we stifling her like she says we are?"

Guido makes a noise of protest. "C'mon boss. That didn't sound fine to me."

"You're right." Giorno runs his fingers across the back of Guido's hand before stepping away from the table. "After the SPW meeting, we'll go to see her. If it's nothing," Giorno shakes his hair out of his ponytail and slumps into his chair, "it's nothing."

He looks across the balcony. The sky is still a dark orange with the late summer sky, and in the shade of the hotel the heat of the day feels passably bearable. There are people speaking down below in the parking lot, but the English sounds like nonsense to Giorno's ears. His head throbs with each pause of the indecipherable conversation.

"Guido," he says into his hands as he brings up one to his temple and the other to rub at the bridge of his nose, "let's go on vacation."

"Boss?" Giorno picks up his almost empty glass, and the wine at the bottom makes a weak red reflection on the table. He holds it out and instead of Guido, Sex Pistols work in tandem to pick up the bottle and pour more. He gives them a soft _thank you_.

"A vacation." He swirls his glass and watches the shifting lights of the wine in its shadow. He takes a deep sip. "It's been so long." He moves the glass and looks through it at the tall palm trees, at the cars in the lot, at the metal fence around the balcony, and then at Guido. Half of what he sees is bent through the glass, and the other half of what he sees is tinted red, and he tilts his glass this way and that to change the angle at which the wine cuts through the images.

"Have we ever been on one?" Guido asks. He's returned to poking at the lasagna and placing the mushrooms on Giorno's plate. "I'm pretty sure we've never been on one."

Giorno finishes his glass of wine and looks at the mushrooms. They're some kind of indistinguishable variety of button mushrooms, but a mushroom is a mushroom, and he eats them with little complaint. "Is there anywhere that you've wanted to go?"

"For what? This vacation?"

"Just… anything. Nothing in particular."

Guido waves a forkful of lasagna as he speaks. "Well, considering it's the wrong season we can't just waste our time at a bunch of fashion weeks, but I guess I could go for some time on the water, you know? Maybe we could do that whole, what is it, California surfer thing?" He makes his fork move in what could vaguely be described as wave-like motions, were Giorno being generous.

"We can't exactly take Trish to the beach in California."

"Alright. What about, like, the most beautiful beaches in the world? Outside of Italy, of course," Guido says with a grin.

"Maybe we'll have better ideas in the morning."

"Want me to see about blocking the time off? What'll it be, me, you, Trish?"

"If she'll have us." Giorno waves a hand. "This is a tomorrow-me problem. Help me put this away." Giorno looks at Guido's plate, which still has some eggplant and lasagna. "Unless you're not done?"

"I think I'm going to stay out here a little longer. The AC is a bit too cold for me."

"It wouldn't be so cold if you stopped wearing crop tops."

"Ha! Says the man that wears shirts designed to keep his tits out. Stones in glass houses, Giorno."

Giorno balls up his napkin to toss at Guido, but No. 2 intercepts it before its greasy paper can make its acquaintance with Guido's face. "I'm going to bed then." He gets up, this time with much less scraping of chairs against wood floors.

"Going to shower tonight or tomorrow?"

Giorno pauses in the balcony door, bent over to unfasten his ankle straps and to slip off his pumps. "Tomorrow." He tugs at his tie, and it seems to resist him for a few moments. His hair falls in a curtain in front of his face, and he can see Guido looking at him as he looks back. "Tomorrow," he repeats before going inside.

* * *

Tomorrow, it turns out, starts well after ten in the morning. The sun is high and bright, and the curtains do a poor job in keeping most of the light out. Another _giorno_ for Giorno, as it were. By the time he understands why the sun is so strong in the windows, the panic has set in. _God_, he thinks to himself, and repeats over and over.

"Guido!" he calls out while tripping out of bed, his hair a mess of uncombed curls, and his only pjs the underwear with which he crawled under the sheets. And a single sock. He must have kicked the other one off sometime during his clearly over twelve hours of rest. When he gets to the bathroom he is no closer to knowing where his other sock is, but he is closer to Guido. He opens the second door in the bathroom connecting to Guido's room without knocking, and sticks his neck out while hiding the rest of his body behind the wood like some poor imitation of a giraffe.

"What time is it?" he asks before he can even find Guido.

"Fifteen to." He hears from somewhere that he can't see in the room. He cranes his neck further around the door and spies Guido at a desk, casually flicking through a newspaper. Guido looks at him with an unreasonably placid expression.

"To what?"

"Eleven."

"And you didn't wake me up?"

Guido shrugs and closes the newspaper in the same motion, but otherwise doesn't move from his seat. "Well, I tried a bit earlier but you didn't get up, and I figured you needed the sleep. Besides, meeting isn't until one."

"Guido," Giorno says in his most authoritative voice. The effect is ruined by how absolutely awful his mouth feels, and how dry his throat is.

"We've got tickets to fly out tomorrow morning. Direct flight, if you were wondering."

Giorno clears his throat, but it only makes him sound worse. "Thank you. I appreciate your work, as always."

"No problem boss. If you fix yourself up fast enough we can get you some late breakfast. Or early lunch. Whichever."

"Brunch?"

Guido pauses. "Is that a real word?"

"It's English for breakfast and lunch."

"Ok, sure then. We can get you some brunch."

Giorno stays half behind and half around the door for a confused few seconds. "Alright," he says, the muzzy-from-sleep quality still prominent in his words. "I will… see you soon." He closes the door, and spots his other sock by the base of the toilet.

This is the metaphorical straw that breaks the camel's back, and Giorno uses his foot to swing the door to his room half way shut, and then crawls into the bathtub and shower combo while still wearing his briefs and the single sock. He turns on the shower and sits in the tub for a good half hour, his body sore, his eyes heavy, his head throbbing. An attempt is made to shampoo and perfunctorily condition his hair with the hotel bottles, and he uses the soap bar to wash himself down. He takes off the briefs and sock when he needs to, and looks at the washcloth where it hangs from the bar and out of his reach. He spends more time than he'd admit drinking the shower water that hits his face, and when his mouth becomes too bitter to ignore anymore he stumbles to the sink to grab his toothbrush and toothpaste, which he immediately brings back with him to the shower. It is a long, agonizing forty-five minutes. The only thing that gets him out of the shower is when he remembers the Imitrex in his suitcase, and he leaves without looking at the towels to throw open his luggage. He swallows the pills dry when he fishes the bottle out from where it's been wedged between a few pairs of shoes, and his relief at finding it is enough to make him forget about the migraine for a few precious moments. It comes back to the forefront of his mind with a vengeance, as it always does.

He paws through his shoes, trying to focus on what he'll wear to the meeting. He does not, however, find his white Louboutin stilettos, which is a sin in and of itself, he's sure of it. Instead he settles for the Aurene pumps, also in white leather, but embellished with gold tone heels and toes. His frustrations don't end there. He can't find his Diane von Furstenberg jumpsuit. It is sleeveless and with a plunging neckline, in a soft egg-shell silk-viscose rayon blend. The neckline is banded in black and transitions into a sash around the waistline, and its wide-leg pants are perfect for moving in. He should know, since he's often worn it when he needs to look smart but be able to deal with stand users in a moment's notice. He'd wanted to wear it, in the event that Kujo becomes a problem, despite Enrico's assurances.

To keep in line with his wide-leg jumpsuit desires, Giorno digs out the Ralph Lauren one. He'd be embarrassed by all the white if he hadn't had years to come to terms with his color choices post being fifteen years old, but at twenty-six he's gotten over such issues. The side on-seam pockets are perhaps his favorite feature, and the v-neck is not as deep as he'd like, but the golden zipper all the way down the front makes up for the short neckline. This jumpsuit is also sleeveless, and its wide legs just hit the floor when he wears the Aurene pumps.

By the time he's gotten dressed his migraine has reduced to a dull throb. Another pass through his suitcase confirms that he cannot find the Louboutin heels nor the DVF jumpsuit, and he is just as confused as when he stepped out of the shower. But no matter. When he looks at the clock he sees that it is already five past twelve, and he quickly uses some gel to slick back his hair. Might as well embrace the wet look, he supposes as he knocks on the door to Guido's room. When he gets a muffled _come in!_ he does just that.

He finds Guido lying stomach-down on his bed, puruising some glossy magazine. "Was wondering if I'd have to barge on in there to get you to hurry it up." He points to where Giorno found him at nearly an hour ago, and there's a solitary paper cup on the desk. "Got you some of that Starbucks. They make a fine cappuccino, but I had to double check that that was their smallest size. Americans, huh?"

Giorno takes a taste of the aforementioned cappuccino. It is, as Guido said, fine.

"Shall we go?" Giorno asks when he gets a few sips deeper into the cup.

"Only guy we're waiting on is you, boss."

"And you."

"Huh?" Guido closes his magazine and turns to Giorno by propping one elbow on the bed.

Giorno gestures to Guido's clothes. "The Versace mixed print shirt is acceptable if, and this is important Guido, it is the _only_ print in your outfit." The shirt is truly an affront to Giorno's senses, and the name brand and price tag bring it from annoying to insulting. One of the sleeves is in a jaguar print, and that same print runs at an asymmetrical stripe along the hem of the shirt. Around the left breast and neckline there is a bizarre series of hearts with hearts inside hearts, and there is a collection of gold filigree patterning, stars and _barocco _geometric patterns in black and white across the rest of the shirt. He'd paired this shirt with the mixed Zebra and Giraffe _animalier_ print silk shorts and a gold satin bomber jacket that is embellished with a finely embroidered dragon. To make it all worse, he'd worn the sneakers with the same jaguar print as the one on his shirt, and he looks completely unapologetic.

"I've got to wear all these prints to balance out all your white."

"Guido," Giorno says with discernable distress, "I can't be seen with you in public."

"Good thing I'm not supposed to be seen then, huh?"

"Everyone that could possibly see you will immediately see you and continue to keep seeing you long after you've left. You are the least inconspicuous person that I've had the displeasure of ever laying my eyes on. In my life."

"Hey," Guido says as he gets off the bed and goes towards the door. "I've seen those pictures of your dad. I'd say it's a greater sin to be related to a guy that wears a leotard with yellow spandex chaps and gold jester shoes than it is to wear Versace." He holds the door open and sweeps his hand out. "It's time to go, Your Majesty."

"One of these days you will wear an outfit so terrible, I will be forced to take you out with my own hands."

"Oh! Sounds kinky boss. Looking forward to it."

Giorno slaps Guido's arm as he passes by, and Guido's grin is unrepentant. "This is just another reason why I love Trish more."

"But just because you love her more doesn't mean that you don't love me."

"Unfortunately." They get to the elevator and Giorno presses the button with more force than strictly necessary.

* * *

The drive to the Speedwagon Foundation offices near the Jensen Beach to Jupiter Inlet Aquatic Preserve is one of the longest half hours that Giorno has ever had the displeasure of experiencing. Every so often he will glance over at Guido, who is as peachy as can be in the driver's seat, and he will stare in fascinated horror. It feels like watching a car crash over and over again, and there's absolutely no way to get away. Guido's smile gets wider every time he catches Giorno staring.

"Don't you dare say it," Giorno warns when Guido starts to open his mouth. His warning goes unheeded.

"See something you like?" Guido takes a hand off the wheel to finger gun at Giorno, and with that single action he can feel his head start to throb again.

"You and I both know they won't be able to find your body."

They pull into the parking lot of the offices, and Guido uses this opportunity to turn his torso to Giorno. "Hey, maybe I'm into that."

Giorno crinkles his nose in distaste. "I'm sure we could find you someone from the Execution Squad whose tastes match yours. What will it be? Suffocation, drowning, dismemberment, exsanguination…?"

Guido puts his hands up. "I got it, I got it. So, do you want me to come in with you or not?"

Giorno's sigh is deep. "Give me one of Sex Pistols. You'll come in with me, but as a sign of," he looks out across the lot, and it is nearly empty despite it being midday, "good will, I will go in to the meeting alone. If I need your backup, I will let you know."

No. 7 buzzes out of Guido's jacket to fly around Giorno's head as they get out of the rental. The sheer and utter lack of security by the entrance, and just any other people for that matter, is enough to make Giorno break out in a cold sweat under his jumpsuit. The doors slide open with an automatic whir, and the AC of the building is too cool to be comfortable. He can feel No. 7 trying to get settled in his pocket and he puts a hand down to offer to the stand. It immediately tries to cocoon itself with Giorno's palm and fingers, and Guido shoots him a questioning look as Giorno steps by him to walk up to the front desk secretary.

The secretary is a mousy woman with mousy features, and she looks positively dwarfed by her desk, which is an imposing monstrosity of contorted wood. Her brown hair is in a modest bob that sweeps just above her shoulders, her glasses are a terrible combination of being large, black, and rectangular, and her periwinkle cardigan looks to be of a thick blend of fabrics. Fashion choices aside, Giorno can appreciate a good cardigan in this sub 20 °C building. He sees her eyes dart between the two of them before settling on Guido.

"Mister," she looks down at her desktop monitor, "Giorno Giovanna? For the 1pm?"

Giorno clears his throat and steps more solidly in front of Guido. "Yes, I am Giorno Giovanna, and yes, I am here for my meeting."

She blinks owlishly at them from behind her large rimmed glasses, and her eyes are magnified by the glasses. "Right. Well. You can head towards the elevators and go to the fifth floor. Your friend can stay here in the lobby." Giorno tilts his head to look at the secretary for a moment before turning to look at Guido.

"Signorina," he starts, but does not continue. The two of them stare at each other, possibly both equally confused, but for entirely different reasons. "What have your superiors told you about me?"

This is clearly not the question she was expecting, because her mouth opens slightly, but no words come out. "...Nothing?" she finally responds.

"If you would be so kind as to phone them." She looks between the two of them again, and Giorno can feel Guido against his side. Eventually she must find reason enough to call, because she turns away from them to pick up the phone. Giorno shifts his weight to press into Guido, and settles in the watch the ticking of the clock on the wall behind the desk. As subtle as he can, Giorno moves his hand from his pocket, disturbing No. 7 but unable to apologize, and places his fingers on Guido's thigh, where he taps out a few letters. A simple message of three short taps, three long taps where he presses his fingers into the meat of Guido's thigh, and then three short taps again. He hears Guido hum in acknowledgment by his ear, but otherwise they say nothing to each other. He moves his hand back into his pocket, where No. 7 eagerly makes itself at home in his palm again.

The secretary's conversation passes by him in a blur of English that he doesn't pay attention to. What Giorno focuses on instead is rolling his fingers around and over No. 7, who seems to be dozing in his pocket. While he can't hear No. 7's thoughts on the matter, he can certainly hear Guido's.

Mindful of the secretary, Guido speaks in soft Italian. "Hey, knock it off. That tickles you know."

"Tickles, does it?"

"Boss. You can't be serious right now."

And Giorno would be, had the receptionist not spoken up to get their attention. She stands up, and suddenly seems shaky on her legs.

"I am so deeply sorry, sir," the phone is still clutched in her palm, "I've just been told that there was supposed to be a formal reception and briefing for you, but with… recent events, our operations have been thrown into disarray."

Giorno has a second to debate if he will use his ill-gotten knowledge or not. Deciding that he simply does not care at the moment, he goes all in. "This wouldn't have to do with Dr. Kujo being incapacitated, would it?"

The reception's mouth drops open in what is almost a parody of surprise. "How did you know?" she confirms for them.

Giorno gives her surprise a suitable response by winking at her and then saying, "Bella. You now know who I am. Do you really think such information is beyond me?"

She spend several moments stuttering before returning to coherency. "Dr. Kujo is not available to speak since he is, as you know, in a coma."

Well. He knows now, he supposes. But a coma? He'll have to ask Enrico what they did later. "And who is available to meet us? If there was no one, I would have appreciated had I been contacted before I flew over to the States."

"This is… a recent occurrence?"

"How recent?"

"Last night recent," she says in a tremulous voice. This, of course, causes the proverbial shoe to fall for both the receptionist and Giorno. "How did you… say that you found out about Dr. Kujo being in a coma?" she questions, and her voice is perhaps even more wobbly than before, if that were possible.

"I didn't." Giorno looks at the receptionist, and she looks back at him. Her eyes seem impossibly wide behind her glasses. _Last night_, he thinks to himself. His meeting yesterday with Enrico was in the early afternoon.

"My superiors," she starts but then stops.

"The fifth floor?" he supplies.

"Y-yes."

"And my _friend_ will be coming as well."

"Of course, Mr. Giovanna." The receptionist shakily sits back down, phone gripped tightly in both of her hands.

"Thank you for the help, Signorina." The two of them sweep away from the desk, and behind them Giorno can hear her calling her superiors again.

"Last night?" Giorno asks Guido in Italian as they head to the elevators down at the other end of the unassuming lobby.

"We didn't get anything about something happening last night." Guido presses the _up_ button and they both turn to face each other as they wait. "I thought you said I was gonna stay down here, as a show of good will?"

"Plans change, Guido. You know that." Giorno lowers his voice. "On a more serious note, I wasn't going to go up alone after that conversation."

"Especially with that bit about how…" Guido pauses before he says a name, "the priest's information turned out."

Giorno hums. "I could have used a better warning."

"Maybe they didn't know the specifics yesterday when they told you?"

"Hm. They strike me as the type to plan for years before acting. They knew what they were going to do."

The elevator dings, and the doors open with a faint groan. Giorno sweeps his hand out. "After you."

* * *

They have been sitting around a conference table for half an hour, exchanging niceties and the like over coffee and store-bought pastries. Giorno wants to scream, but he instead nibbles at a cheese danish as he watches the SPW representatives sweat in their seats. The coffee is watery, it is sweet, and it is milky. At some point he knows that he will drink it out of desperation, but he has not reached that point. Yet. He can feel it coming quickly.

There are three SPW representatives seated around the table, opposite of himself and Guido. The one to Giorno's right is so stereotypical of an American businessman it is to the point of comedy. Short brown hair, eyes as watery as Giorno's coffee, a slightly ill-fitting suit in a depressing navy with a starched white dress suit and a nondescript tie. The man in front of him seems more field-work than higher up. Probably a stand user, brought in due to the lack of their Plan A fire power. His hair is scruffy, and the only thing scruffier is his leather jacket. Giorno shudders at having to look at an unkempt mullet in the second decade of the twenty-first century. A scar bisects his left eyebrow and left eye, and clips through his mouth and ends in a jagged line down the side of his chin. A memorable scar, to be sure. The third is a concerning-looking scientist. Why she wore her lab coat to this meeting Giorno has no idea, but she is the only one of the three to have a notepad and a pen. Her dark hair is pulled away from her face in a curly afro puff on top of her head. Her attentive gaze is the only one that gives him pause.

But this has gone on long enough, and he only has so much patience. "Now," he starts, and immediately he has all of their attentions, "as I understand it, I was asked to come over as there was something rather urgent that needed to be discussed. In person. As pleasant as this is, I'm sure that I speak for all of us when I say that we have busy schedules."

There is a murmur of ascent around the table. Guido surreptiously slides a cherry pastry under the table to the rest of Sex Pistols minus No. 7, who had stayed in Giorno's pocket. It looks for a moment that the American businessman will start what will no doubt be a riveting conversation, but the scientist speaks up before he gets a chance to even open his mouth.

"We just heard something rather interesting, you know." She looks at Giorno but doesn't actually seem to be _looking_ at him. Her eyes track somewhere over his shoulder, but he knows that Requiem is not floating behind him. He resists the urge to turn his head.

"Did you?"

"Oh yes." She has her pen pressed into her notepad, and she traces out lazy, perfect circles. Some of them are concentric and some of them overlap, but her hand is remarkably stable as she draws them. "It seems that you are rather well-informed about the status of one of our operatives."

"No more than you are about me and mine," he tears off a piece of the danish that he's been picking at for the past few minutes and brings it to his mouth but does not eat. "Or so I would imagine." He eats the pastry.

She makes a non-committal hum. "They certainly don't work as fast as yours." Giorno inclines his head in acknowledgment but says nothing. Unlike his conversation with Enrico, he does not feel compelled to give answers to unasked questions. Here, in this featureless office room, he only feels the beginnings of annoyance trickling into his stomach.

"An international organization such as yours surely has a far greater reach than mine."

"Our priorities," she says with a voice as steady as her hand, "are medical research and environmental conservation."

"An odd day then, to find yourself in bed with the Italian mafia." The businessman begins to splutter, but the scientist puts up her free hand to stop whatever he wanted to say.

"More of a friendly meeting with a descendant of the Joestars," she says.

"A Joestar?" A deliberate refusal to acknowledge Dio Brando, or something more genuine? He tosses that thought away as quickly as he thinks it, annoyed with himself for even grasping at the connection.

"Yes. A Joestar."

Giorno leans forward, bringing his elbows on the table and steepling his fingers out in front of him. He uses the movement to glance down at her notepad, which is covered with more circles, but there is nothing noticeable about them besides their uniform shape. "And what am I here to talk to you about? As a Joestar to the Speedwagon Foundation, of course."

"First, you could explain to us why a Joestar would attack another Joestar."

Giorno allows himself to smile, and would have made eye contact with her, had she been looking at him and not over his shoulder. Instead he has to settle for speaking at her. "I," he says with a pause, "did not attack Dr. Kujo."

It seems this is what gets her attention, and her eyes snap to his face in a second. Her hand also seems to stop, if the stillness of her upper arm is an indication. "You did not attack him." She says in that flat tone, and her two colleagues startle in her direction.

"Really?" asks the scarred man, but he directs his question at the scientist rather than at Giorno. In the moments of their distraction, Giorno flicks his eyes to Guido. All he sees there is a scrunched brow, wrinkles along the bridge of Guido's nose, and the same confusion that he feels reflected in those dark eyes. But Guido, who has been party to much more confusing conversations, plays his role well. He slouches back into his seat, and puts his weight such that the chair tips slightly. He sprawls his legs open and puts a hand under his chin, ever the picture of nonchalance. Giorno turns his attention back to the SPW representatives, grateful that they are still looking at their colleague, and that the scientist has turned her focus down to her notepad.

"What reason would I have to lie to you about this?" Giorno leans back slightly, but keeps his elbows on the table. The scientist looks back and him, and her frown is dissatisfied.

"I suppose… that you didn't."

"It almost seems like you're disappointed. Did you want me to attack Dr. Kujo?" It's the only reason he can think of for her expression, but he can't tell why she would want the Italian mafia stepping into Speedwagon affairs.

"No," she trails off, looking behind his shoulder again. "No. It just means that we don't know who attacked one of our strongest agents. And when we got word from Eleanor downstairs…"

"Life is hardly that convenient though, Doctor." Giorno turns his attention to the other two. "I believe we still have business to attend to?"

"Just one moment." The scientist interrupts again, still not looking at him. He would have No. 7 look behind him if he knew who was and wasn't a stand user in the room.

"Yes?"

"You said that _you_ did not attack Dr. Kujo."

"I did indeed say that."

"But you know who did?"

Her arm, which had been moving in smooth consistent circles, suddenly makes a larger arc. It is minute, and he only sees the change because he has been tracking her motions, but he sees it all the same. She must have drawn something other than a circle. On purpose? He doesn't know. He also doesn't look.

"I have suspicions," he settles on.

"Strong suspicions?"

"Suspicions. No evidence, no proof. Just a hunch."

She hums. It sounds dissatisfied. "The timing…How many people do you have in the US?"

Of all the questions—of all the assumptions—it causes Giorno to laugh. But for a group that seems to think he has the time and the inclination for world domination, maybe they are just the sort of people to think that he cares about planting agents in American soil. He's careful about how he laughs, the act of it. He moves one hand up to cover his mouth, and another down to his side, into his pocket to reach No. 7. He throws his head back slightly, feels his hair slide down his shoulders, and stretches out the length of his neck with the laughter. He feels No. 7 brush close to his fingers, and he tells the stand _cerchi_ with a series of short and long taps. _Search_. No. 7 will know to stay low and out of sight. Giorno and Mista had already discussed the possibility of all the Speedwagon Foundation representatives being stand users, and he wasn't about to risk assuming that they aren't. Once the stand slips out of his pocket, he refocuses on the trio across the table.

"I don't keep people in the US," he eventually says, and he doesn't even have to fake catching his breath a little. "And to answer your next question, no one told me about what happened to Dr. Kujo." Which is true, in a sense. He has a guess as to what the scientist is trying to pick up on, and when he lets his vision shift enough that he can see the notepad from his peripheral vision, she has gone back to drawing amazingly perfect circles. There are a few ovals on the page, but she seems to have moved on from them.

Her gaze is drawn back to him just like the last time he had made a statement that seemed to displease her, and she is shocked once again. "Nobody told you." This causes the businessman to visibly startle in his seat, knocking his empty cup over.

"How did you know?" The man with the scar asks, his brows drawn together with thick wrinkles. He has both hands on the table in front of him, and they are clenched in loose fists.

"You asked me here as a Joestar, did you not?" His office, with its folders of ill-gained knowledge on the Joestars, also contains the information that supposedly they can tell each other from blood. Had Trish not demonstrated the ability with Diavolo all those years ago he would not have believed it, despite all the rest of what he's seen. He has, after all, never felt a compulsion towards his mother, and she seemed to be actively repulsed by his very existence. And besides, were it a reality of his life, he figures one of the Joestars would have approached him before now. But alas, such is not the case. The fabled Joestar blood. What a disappointment.

This is, apparently, enough for the scientist to come to her own conclusions. "Of course!" She exclaims, looking the most engaged that she's been throughout the entire conversation. "We had wondered if the contamination from Dio Brando would dilute the effect…" She trails off, and looks at him expectantly. _Contamination_, he thinks to himself. It's not a thought he has for long. He discards it, much as he does with most of the opinions of people that will be ultimately inconsequential in his life. Instead, he once again uses the knowledge that he has gained from the Speedwagon Foundation itself.

"I am aware of another Joestar in the state. It would do you well to keep an eye on her." Of the active, actual threats to Jolyne Kujo's person, he is aware of exactly zero of them. And even if he has the faintest idea of _who_ might be going after her next, he cares not one iota. Instead, he thinks of the sound of those wooden soles, their tap against the floor. The rhythm of them, the cadence. The sound of Enrico's shoes, the motion of their steps, the movement of their body, the swish of their black cassock. The _clack_. Drumming behind his eyes. He wishes that he could rub his forehead, put his head down on the table, close the lights. But what he wants—

Tugging—there's tugging at his hand, the one that is still in his pocket. He moves his fingers, and No. 7 rests against his palm, tapping against the meat of his hand between his thumb and his index finger. In his vision all he sees are the three SPW representatives, and when he turns his head to look at Guido, the gunman is focused on the rest of Sex Pistols that are hiding under the table.

In his distraction, it seems that the three across from him have managed to have a hushed conversation. It is, admittedly, a bit of a lop-sided conversation, with the businessman sitting there, pressing an ill-suited poor piece of tissue paper to his forehead, gnawing away at his fingernails with such a fervor that Giorno worries for the man's cuticles.

"—stand user breakout—"

"—Johngalli… shot dead—"

"—the submarine… by the beach—"

Their conversation goes too quickly for Giorno to follow in English and, contrary to SPW beliefs, he does not have near instantaneous updates on their activities and operations. He can only assume that whatever they're discussing relates to the youngest Joestar descendant, and that perhaps his guess was too close to reality for comfort.

"Had I known that I was summoned to be talked around, I would not have come," he says, waving his free hand at Guido. Casual, is the goal. Smooth. Seamless. He's done this hundreds of times. In Italian he says, "they found something." Guido perks up. It's simple. Misleading to anyone else, even if they understand the words. The three across the table startle from their conversation, all mentions of beaches and submarines seemingly forgotten. Giorno stands, and No. 7 taps at the meat of his hand and pulls at his thumb, incessant. He wonders how far he can push this. Even if he doesn't feel that the representatives across from him are threats… they could be. They could just be hiding their abilities. Ah—but does he care? He already knows the answer. He stands there, and they look back at him, silent. For once the businessman is not spluttering. At his side Guido is attentive, but still seated.

"It seems," Giorno says, and he places both of his hands on the table in front of him, oh-so-carefully leaning forward, "that you have not been entirely honest with me." While the other two look between himself and Guido, the scientist stares directly at Giorno. Her gaze, once firmly stuck up and behind his shoulder, flits across his face, then across his shoulders, and then across his chest. He doesn't lean further forward. He also doesn't need to. Her eyes seem to get snagged somewhere along the zipper going down his torso, and they follow that line back up his neck and to his face. One for three. A perfectly acceptable average.

"That's pretty bad form, you know," Guido pipes up from Giorno's side, and the scientist looks at Giorno for a beat longer before turning to Guido. The other two have already turned their attention to the gunman. Guido is, as always, the picture of relaxation. His legs are spread out in front of him, chair tilted, one arm thrown behind the back of the chair and the other hidden underneath the table, presumably resting on his thigh.

Leather jacket with the scar snorts. "Right," he says while mirroring Guido's pose. "Like you've been entirely honest with us."

The scientist looks back at Giorno. Her eyes would be a rich and friendly brown in any other situation, and he imagines that she was perhaps indeed genuine when she said that the SPW was involved in conservation and medical pursuits. But she had been the one that the other two had deferred to, and clearly was the one he has to convince. Of what, he's not sure. But No. 7 has seen something, and that something was more than likely a threat. His eyes snag on the coffee cup in front of him on the table. That damned, untouched, watery drip coffee.

Giorno shifts his weight to his right hand and reaches with his left. He leans forward. She follows the motion again, and he can see when her eyes track the swing of his zipper down in its spot above his abdomen. He thinks that she's been ernest, at the very least. A change of pace from the usual fare that he deals with.

"I thought that we had come to an agreement," he says while bringing the cup back towards himself, leaning more on his right hand and straightening up ever-so-slightly. He takes a sip. Burnt, and weak. He keeps the wince from his face. "What ever happened to not using your stands?"

He can see her eyes widen in the moments just before she scrambles away from the table, tripping down to the floor in her haste. Guido's body is solid next to his and his revolver is pointed at something behind Giorno's shoulder. Requiem's arms have sprouted forth from Giorno's body, held loosely by his sides. The businessman has hidden himself either behind the obvious muscle of the three of the SPW representatives, or beneath the table. It's hard to tell from his angle, but he also doesn't care. Oddly enough the man in the leather jacket has not summoned a stand. Visibly at least, Giorno supposes.

"Guido," Giorno says after a moment of watching the scientist kneel behind the table while the man in the leather jacket just stands there, "what's behind me?"

Guido shifts against him. "Looks like a jellyfish, Boss. A floating, kind of weird-looking jellyfish." Giorno turns, and Requiem detaches themself from him. They remain by the table and their eyes rove between the SPW representatives.

Behind them floats not a jellyfish but a siphonophore—a Portugese man of war, to be exact. Giorno jerks Guido away from it and calls Requiem in front of himself, eyeing the _Physalia physalis_ with more than a little hesitation. Its body is a tessellation of constantly spiraling enneagons, colored with several distinct shades of blue and purple. It wobbles in the air, a good one and a half meters off the ground, and its tentacles coil and slip around as if it were floating in the ocean. Guido keeps his revolver trained on it nonetheless, despite being bodily moved.

"Don't think it can't kill you," says the man in the leather jacket, "that's no regular man-o'-war."

Guido snorts. "No kidding. Who would think that thing is natural?"

"Michael," scolds the scientist from where she kneels against the floor, and Giorno is distracted by three competing thoughts. Firstly, that these stooges three had honestly neglected to introduce themselves, secondly, that he had never pressed them on the ridiculousness of inviting him to a meeting and not giving their names, and thirdly, that this man's name was Michael. Porca miseria—but where was the panache? A man wearing a scruffy leather jacket, with a mullet and large facial scar, working for the Speedwagon Foundation, named Michael?

"It's not a fighting stand—I mean, well." A single tentacle floats towards Giorno, and Guido shoves his revolver out.

"You've got less than a second to get this thing out of our faces before I start shooting."

"Ocean Man!" The tentacle stops, frozen in midair. A quiver shakes the man of war's body, and then it floats away from them and around the table towards the SPW representatives. It stops not by Michael, but by the scientist. Giorno looks around the room before putting a hand back in his pocket, and No. 7 doesn't need to be told twice. They fly off, close to the ground, and Giorno does a cursory sweep of his own. He turns back to the table but does not recall Requiem.

Guido waves his revolver between Michael and the scientist. "Don't think you're off the hook. I better start hearing some explanations. And fast." Michael snorts, and Guido trains his revolver on the other man, somewhere between his eyes. "Want to test how happy my trigger finger is? Because that's what you're in for if you keep that attitude up."

"Please, please," the scientist puts her hands up, and the stand wraps one of its tentacles around her wrist. Its other tentacles stretch out into the air around itself, but it curiously keeps them away from Michael. "I use it to observe. Emotions, things like stress and comfort. Mostly with the animals I work with."

"Listen, lady," Guido gestures with his free hand, waving it this way and that way, "I know I'm wearing a lot of animal print, but that's not—"

"No, no, I was using Ocean Man to observe." Another one of Ocean Man's tentacles wraps around her wrist, and it sways with the movements of her arm. "A lie detector of sorts. I was keeping tracking of Mr. Giovanna's feelings, looking for anything to indicate that he was lying to us."

"I assume that is why you were drawing the circles." Giorno tilts his head, looking at her notepad. "You have a remarkably steady hand." Requiem melts mostly back into his body, but their arms stay out. One of those arms takes the unfinished coffee from his hand and places it on the table, much further from Giorno than it originally was.

"You noticed that?"

Guido huffs, and answers before Giorno can. "It was hard not to. What were the ovals for?"

She blushes, and the color runs down her neck and up to her ears, along the sides of her face. "Not exactly subtle, was it?"

"No, it wasn't." Guido lowers his revolver to his side, but doesn't put it away.

"When I asked if you knew who has attacked Dr. Kujo, it seemed that Mr. Giovanna felt… concerned? Worried? Different than he had during the rest of the conversation."

"So the ovals are what? Changes in emotions, or for specific emotions?" Guido asks, still tense by Giorno's side.

"Oh, a little of both. I was just trying to signal to the other two what I was seeing."

"Very well then," Giorno sits down and crosses his legs, but Requiem still does not retract their hands. He can't feel anything from their end besides a distant humming. "Why don't we get to what you've actually called me here to discuss?" Michael looks at Giorno in much the same way that he has throughout this entire conversation, and Giorno would swear that there was a gleam to Michael's eyes. Another stand? He doesn't know. "Although, I must say that I'm disappointed. Since when have I ever given you reason to doubt my cooperation?" Guido doesn't move from his spot, but instead leans against the table by Giorno. His gun also stays out.

"You honestly don't think we'd just believe the mafia, right? You'd have to be crazy—"

"Michael!"

"Liliya, be realistic. We know these guys are hiding what they've been doing."

"And what, pray tell, have we been doing?" Giorno asks.

"You've been making vampires, that's what. This entire damn time." Michael brings his fists back on to the table, and none too softly. His fists bang against the wood. Giorno spares a thought that Enrico's intel has rung true so far, even if his cryptic remarks about Kujo had not resolved itself in a way that Giorno had been expecting.

"If you're speaking about the masks that we've been finding, which, need I remind you, we've been turning over to the Speedwagon Foundation, I don't know where they're coming from, or why they seem to keep coming back."

"Sure you don't—"

"He's telling the truth," Liliya interrupts, her eyes focused on her stand, rather than on the space behind Giorno's shoulder.

"See?" Guido says with a wave of his revolver, "the jellyfish trusts us."

"How do you explain all the vampires then?" Michael asks before the words even have a second to leave Guido's mouth.

"I don't know. It seems there is something drawing them to the places where others were already found." Giorno says.

"They always wear the same stuff too," Guido adds.

Liliya looks away from her stand to focus on Guido. "What do you mean?"

"Well, we've been having vampire troubles in Rome, near where those other masks were found. And they're always dressed up like some kind of Nazi fanatics or like some ancient gladiotors and stuff. They're real invested in the whole costume thing too. Don't say a lick of Italian to us when we find them."

Giorno speaks up. "Generally they are near where you found the Pillar Men. The masks also seem to be popping up there as well."

"You're saying these vampires are what, wannabe historical roleplayers that became vampires? Vampires that like to congregate at known vampire hot spots? I'm having a hard time believing that there's some underground vampire LARP'ing society." Michael's hands are spread out on the table, with his fingers fruitlessly digging into the table top. Giorno shares the sentiment. He taps one of his own fingers on the faux-wood.

"I had been hoping that you would have more answers than I. After all, I have been turning over everything vampire-related that we find."

Michael looks at Liliya, and she nods back. "The issue," she says, "is that now we may have to consider that a third, unknown party is producing Stone Masks and vampires."

"This seems to be a trend, does it not?" Giorno asks. By him, Guido shifts as No. 7 returns, joining the others in the barrel of the revolver.

"A trend of what?" The man of war lets go of Liliya's wrist, and begins to float past Michael. It hovers over where the businessman had presumably fallen to the floor, and then had never gotten back up. Did he faint? Giorno resists the urge to look under the table.

"First with Kujo, and now with the vampires. You _want_ me to have been behind something."

"Want is a strong word," Liliya starts, but does not finish.

Michael continues her thought. "You're Dio Brando's spawn. _And_ you became the head of the Italian mafia by killing everyone else in charge. You're lucky that we didn't take you out when we first learned about you."

"I have been nothing but cooperative since I came to power. I fail to see how the circumstances of my birth merit this kind of distrust. I've never even met the man." Giorno leans forward, and Requiem's arms come to rest on the table. He feels the rush of energy beneath his palms. "And what happened to asking me here as a Joestar?"

"As far as I'm concerned," Micheal says with a slow drawl, as if he were discussing the weather, "the only thing connecting you to the Joestars is that birthmark on your shoulder. Other than that? You're Dio's spawn through and through, straight to the core. A murderer with a taste for power. No normal fifteen year old would have done what you did." Grass buds beneath Requiem's hands, short and green, wet with dew that springs from the table top and condensates from the air. Giorno spends a precious few seconds wrangling back Requiem, and in those moments Guido had jumped forth onto the table, gun in Michael's face.

"I've never met a man more honest or just than Giorno, and you would never have the strength of will to do what he does every day to make Italy a better place."

"I'm sure you believe that," Michael says, calm as can be. Giorno looks around the room again, but still does not see a second stand. Instead, he turns to the scientist.

"And you, Liliya? Do you feel the same way?"

She startles from where she had been looking at her stand, and turns her wide-eyed gaze back to them. She looks at Guido and Michael with no little shock and confusion, and Giorno wonders how she could have missed the commotion at all.

"I, well," she stammers out before taking a few calming breaths, "meeting you has… done enough to, uh, reduce my worries."

"But not remove them?"

"Ah, no," she rubs a hand over one of her cheeks, looking equal parts embarrassed and horrified, "you seem very nice, and you've been honest, as far as I can tell, but…" She covers her lower face, hiding her mouth. The grass under Requiem's hands grows thicker, and Giorno cannot stop their use of energy, which seems to be leaking out of their arms. "I'm sorry, but it's like Michael said. You're a scary man, Giorno Giovanna."

_A scary man_, he thinks to himself. What, like a vampire hiding in the night, waiting to kill his next meal? What do they even think that he'll do to them? They had come here, called him to this meeting, already with an image of him in their minds. Florida, it seems, has few answers for him. Just comparisons and assumptions. And he has more important people to be speaking with. Trish, who he had thought—who he has been close to all these years, and who suddenly started pulling away… He knows that she and Guido had fought over _something_, but had not pressed either of them on the details. He will now, he thinks. In California. But in the here and now, he has this mess to deal with.

"Personal feelings aside," he says with a wave of one of his hands, Requiem's are still on the table, "we're here to discuss business. And apparently the business of how the Speedwagon Foundation feels we have been dealing with the vampire outbreaks. Now, I've had my people taking care of them as much as possible, and we've been turning over any masks that we find. If you don't have any real, tangible suggestions on that front, then I must say that it seems our business has concluded."

"Not so fast, Mafia Man," Michael interjects. "And get your guard dog off of me. We're not done yet."

"Guido Mista is my trusted right-hand man, and you'll treat him with the respect that is due to him. I've let you insult me, but don't think I'll let you insult him." Vines tangle Requiem's fingers, and inch across the table. Ocean Man's tentacles have stretched far and wide, having left its spot by the unconscious businessman to return to Liliya's side. Its tentacles pulse purple with poison.

"Alright," Michael says, "I apologise. And we still need to discuss the matter of The Arrow, which you only acquired from one of our agents. And you clearly can't control your stand, if you're letting it turn the table into some kind of garden."

"The other option is that Requiem could doom you to an infinite number of almost-deaths. You're lucky that they're just ruining your furniture. I could be mean, if you really wanted me to, Michael."

"You're a loose fucking canon, Giovanna. All that shit about helping Italy. You're just out here hoarding shit. The Arrow, buying all that land, the massive building projects—"

"It's to help with the housing insecurity, you dumbass," Guido says, gun still in Michael's face. "You need land and buildings to put a roof over people's heads."

"And the business investments? Funding companies that are probably involved—"

"People need jobs. Christ, how thick can you be. People need jobs for money, so they can buy things like _food_—"

"Sure, sure," Michael stands out of his seat, knocking it down as he thrusts his face into Guido's space. The barrel of the revolver is pressed right against the man's temple. "You really expect me to believe that the mafia is, what? Some great big humanitarian organization? You sure talked a big game about stopping the drug trade in your country, and look at how that turned out!"

"That matter is a bit trickier to deal with than I ever could have imagined," Giorno says. "But homes, food, jobs. That's something we can provide to people to improve their lives. And we need to own the land to circumvent predatory landlord practices, and we need to fund the businesses so that they won't try to make cuts or deny the workers their wages. If you'd just listen—"

"Cut the bullshit. You paint a pretty picture, Giovanna, but your dad had a silver tongue too. I don't trust you as far as I can throw you."

Giorno turns to Liliya. "What did you feel?"

Her blush had died down, but it returns under Giorno's gaze. "You were… but this only works on how you _feel_, it's not an objective fact. Emotions can be tricky, and you could be a remarkable liar."

Giorno stands, and does not knock his chair over. Flowers have grown to accompany the vines and the grass. "Right. So why did you actually call me here? To waste my time? Because that's all that's happening here. And if you think that Passione will work with you after this, you're sorely mistaken."

"That zipper," Liliya interrupts, pointing at where it rests on Giorno's abdomen. "It's very strange to have such strong emotions tied to a zipper."

_Of all things_. She chooses now to discuss a zipper? "It is a memento of a better, kinder man than I. Where he may have entertained you longer, my patience has run out. Both of you have less than a minute to say anything to me before I leave. And know this: I leave here with Passione withdrawing its support to the SPW."

Michael crosses his arms and looks Guido dead in the eyes. "I've got nothing to say to either of you. It's fucking suspicious that Dr. Kujo got attacked right before you came, and that you knew about it. We should have never been working with you people in the first place."

Liliya also gets up, but does not recall her stand. "I want to believe you Mr. Giovanna. And I think that you've been honest. I just don't know if that's enough to make me trust you."

_Trust_. He doesn't need these people to trust him, he just needs them to be able to work with him. But evidently they require something else from him.

"Guido," he says. "Get your gun out of that man's face. We're leaving."

* * *

Giorno Giovanna has spent a not inconsiderable amount of time thinking about how he will die. It's one of his more consuming past times, to be sure. Will it be a stand attack? A particularly bad clam? A bad clam that was part of a stand attack? The possibilities are really only limited by his imagination, which has been constantly stretched ever since joining the Italian mafia. What he had not imagined though, was this:

It is 2011, and he is off the coast of Port St. Lucie, Florida. His flip-flops make an awful suctioning noise as he wades through the tide, and the sun hangs low across the water. It is dawn, and the morning twilight streaks the sky in pinks and yellows. Guido runs out in head of him, deeper into the receding tide as Sex Pistols collectively complain about the smell. They have not yet returned to their hotel or gone to sleep. They had bought the shirts and the swim trunks and the slippers from some American strip mall with various large shopping complexes that all looked roughly the same, and they had done this immediately after the meeting with the Speedwagon Foundation. They've been out here long enough to watch the moon greet them both hello and goodbye, with Giorno's only constant companions being Guido and the anger brewing low in his gut. He still burns from the comparisons. The sheer gall of them to question him after all these years of cooperation.

"Guido!" He calls out, stopping to face the sun. It is full, and overbearingly bright. He has to squint to look at it. Guido turns to face Giorno, his body an indistinct shadow cutting across the light.

"Finally simmered down? I thought me and Sex Pistols were going to starve out here." Giorno does not need to see the smile to know that it's there.

"Not quite. But I'm ready to leave, in any case. We have a plane to catch after all." This causes Sex Pistols to errupt in a rousing cheer, the words indistinguishable over the cacaphony of their tiny voices.

Guido claps Giorno's shoulder as he rushes by, spinning them both around with the momentum. "Well," he says, having decided that they must keep spinning, "have you decided what you're going to do?"

"Yes." They stop, and grab their breath. Guido's hands are warm compared to the chill that's burrowed under Giorno's skin, and the sun promises to be hot on his back. He can't wait to take a shower.

It happens in a moment.

The sky, so bright before he blinked his eyes, is black. Guido makes an indistinct noise of alarm, and then it feels like they've plunged into the ocean. There are no waves to fight, only all encompassing pressure. He finds that he cannot call forth Requiem, an action he would have likened to breathing ever since he learned how to summon Gold Experience. When he looks up, in the direction that he thinks is up, he sees the beach. He sees it as it was several hours ago, illuminated by the moon and deserted by everyone except for the two of them. He reaches out to Guido, and he feels something solid and warm, but he can hear nothing. He tries to open his mouth to yell, but he finds that something rushes in to fill the space. It's not water, for it has none of the sensation of liquid. He tries to bite down, but finds his jaw locked, pried open by whatever has filled his nostrils and his throat, and is pressing down on his body. He tries to squeeze what must be Guido's body, but instead he feels a terrible squeezing all over his body. His limbs feel like they are compressing, collapsing within themselves, and it is almost like he is being pressed through a fine sieve, bit by bit. Oddly enough, there is no pain in the process. Perhaps he's not really being compressed, and this is all in his head. Some hallucination conjured by his mind as a result of no sleep and long hours floating in the water and sitting on wet sand. His head is still looking up, but the beach fades from his view, and he finds that he can no longer remember what it looked like.

But he thinks of water. And he thinks of beaches. And he thinks of sand, and of the smell of salt on wind. He doesn't think of a specific place per se, but more of the experience of being by the ocean. It is at the moment that he thinks of the sea breeze that he remembers to breathe, and finds that he can't. He would have liked to go smelling the ocean, he thinks, and he hears those thoughts echoed out into the space around him. And they are his final thoughts, and they are the final words that he hears.

* * *

A/N: Story and chapter titles from "It's Always You" by Chet Baker. Some background to this WIP can be found from my other JoJo fic, which is also, unfortunately, a currently unfinished WIP.


	2. I watch 'til a star breaks through

Giorno recognizes him almost instantly. Although he has to incline his head slightly to make eye contact, he would know that face anywhere. In the brief moments before either of them speak he's sure that, were he to look, he would see his heart beating frantically just beneath his skin. It's only through his strength of will that he doesn't immediately break out in a cold sweat.

"Hello," the other person says, and Giorno can't tell if they sound the same or not. He's certainly experiencing the sensation of hearing his voice recorded, even if he's never heard how he sounds recorded. The smile on the face in front of him is the kind he doesn't recognize as one that he's practiced in the mirror. It's lopsided, and the dimple on the right hand side is deeper than the other. It's the eyes though. He would recognize them anywhere.

"Hello," he echoes back. Around him he can feel the rest of the team tense and shift, and there is the soft clink of what can only be bullets to his side. He puts his hand out, low and by his hip, towards Mista. The clinking stops.

Those familiar eyes track the movement of his hand, and that unfamiliar smile doesn't falter. Instead the other person flicks his hair, which is slung loosely in a low ponytail, over one shoulder. The gold hair is bright against his white blazer. It cuts a slim silhouette. The action draws Giorno's eyes down the other person's chest, where the jacket has a single golden heart-shaped button and rests over an equally white top that plunges into a sash. The neckline gives an ample view of barely-concealed but small breasts, and dips all the way down to his navel. The other notices Giorno noticing, and that lopsided smile deepens.

"It seems," the person in the white jacket says, with all the indifference one would use to announce that the sky is blue, "that I have either been brought back in time, or to another dimension." Abbacchio barks loudly with disbelief over the tittering of Narancia and Mista. "For me," he plows on, seemingly undeterred, "it is 2011."

Giorno ignores the others. "You're—"

"Yes." _Well_. Giorno tilts his head over his left shoulder to catch Buccellati's eye. The Other Giorno follows the action, and his gaze rests heavy on Bruno. And then, there is a

B A N G.

Several of them, in quick succession. It startles them badly, and within a moment's breath they all have their stands out. Giorno has a second to look at the Other Giorno's stand, which is _not_ Gold Experience, before turning to the commotion at the end of the street. From an alleyway a figure bursts forth, jumping over the trash cans that they've pulled down into the path. Along this impossible trajectory through the air they twist their body in the direction that they've just come from, and the source of the earlier bangs is revealed.

"Sex Pistols!" The man that can only be another Guido Mista yells, his revolver going off. His landing is not as graceful as his flight, and he stumbles down to one knee.

"Guido!" The Other Giorno says while rushing over, and his movements send the rest into action. The… noises coming from the alleyway make the group cautious, save for Giorno's counterpart. Giorno can see the flash of red-lacquered soles as the other manages to run in a pair of rather daunting heels. _White Louboutins_, Giorno notes to himself, transfixed by how the shoes appear and disappear underneath the hem of equally white, wide-legged trousers.

"Boss," Other Mista pants, "we've got a vampire problem." This, perplexingly enough, does not elucidate anything for Giorno. And it doesn't seem to help the others, if their glances are anything to go by. They hang back, a few meters away from the odd pair, but still in sight of the alleyway.

The stand that has just been a barely visible floating visage behind this Other Giorno finally fully materializes, its crowned head making it firmly taller than its user. As it moves in front of the pair it leaves behind a trail of afterimages, all of which blur and begin to coalesce back into the stand proper. Its figure is more of the idea of a figure rather than a defined shape, like the sort of unfocused image you'd get from looking at something far away and bright through the heat haze wafting off of the street. The limb that Giorno thinks is probably the stand's right arm—even if he can't see the exact details of its hand or anything else for that matter—reaches towards a discarded bottle that must have rolled around after the Other Mista knocked the trash cans in his rush. Despite never touching the bottle there seems to be a transference of energy, and the bottle acquires its very own heat haze. It floats several centimeters off the ground, following the motion of the stand's outstretched limb, and Giorno thinks that maybe this Other Giorno was gifted with some sort of telepathy instead of Gold Experience.

And then, there is a burst of light. Giorno expects a rush of heat or maybe a vigorous wind to accompany the light, but he feels nothing except for the disorientation that comes from looking directly at something particularly bright. In between the dark splotches that have dominated his vision he thinks he sees the light transform into a beam that arcs through the sky, but when he rubs his eyes he can see no evidence of the beam. It's what he hears, that is perhaps more telling than what he does not see. There is the unmistakable sound of sizzling, like meat in hot oil. He absolutely does not want to see what was the victim of that beam of light, and what is the source of the sound, but the rest of the group has already begun to move towards the pair. Narancia has pulled out Aerosmith and his visor, and the little toy plane plane is pointed down the alleyway.

"Whatever is down there isn't breathing anymore, Buccellati."

"They were never breathing in the first place," the Other Giorno says from where he's helping the Other Mista stand up. "I believe that the life energy from Requiem should have been enough to stop them though."

Abbacchio stalks towards the pair while Bruno inches closer to the alleyway, Sticky Fingers floating just in head. "And you just expect us to take your word for it?" Giorno can feel the headache burgeoning behind his eyes. It seems that any version of himself is destined to somehow draw Abbacchio's ire.

The Other Mista, although no where near Abbacchio's height, has clearly filled out in ways that Giorno's Mista has not yet had the time to. He steps in front of his Giorno and into Abbacchio's path, and his black eyes have that same intensity that Mista has when he's looking down the barrel of his revolver. "Oi, Abbacchio," he says, which only causes said man to marginally slow down in his approach. "Step off Giorno's dick, would ya?" Abbacchio pulls up short, his nostrils flaring and his hair whipping back with the force of his full body jerk. The little purple hat that seems to be preternaturally stuck to his head also slides down, and Giorno would outwardly wince were he not frozen in his spot.

"You little shit," Abbacchio says while ripping that hat off his head, "it sounds like you're asking me to punch you."

"Abbacchio! That's enough," Bruno says from his spot by the overturned trash cans, Aerosmith hovering over his head. To Narancia he says, "Shoot the people at the end of here. While I don't doubt your information," he says to the pair, "it doesn't hurt to be safe."

Narancia follows Bruno's orders to a T, perhaps a bit too vigorously. The machine guns echo loudly, and the rest of the group goes to stand by their _capo_ to investigate the carnage. The groaning that Giorno had heard earlier has either stopped, or has been completely masked by the _bratatat_ of Aerosmith's guns. It is with little optimism that Giorno hopes for the former and steels himself for the latter.

What he sees at the end of the alleyway makes very little sense. There is a tangle of bodies—how many, he doesn't know—and they seem to glow like the embers of slow-dying coal at the bottom of a fire pit. Much like that coal, these people shed sooty ash, which fills the air in particularly thick clouds where Aerosmith's bullets have disturbed dry flesh. The piles of desiccated meat writhe on the floor, teeth and hair and fingers shedding in some sort of parody of magnolia trees in spring. He doesn't need to hear them to imagine what they must sound like, the rattling of their breathing through their mouths that gape wide, jaws split open and away from their skulls.

But before any of them can move—to do what, what can they even do, are they really just going to let these people crawl on the ground—the unnamed shimmering stand is suddenly going down the alleyway. Giorno follows the movement, eager to have something else to look at. This time the stand motions with one of its maybe-legs at the trash cans on the floor, and they float, just like the bottle did before. Giorno closes his eyes before that burst of light can catch him off-guard, and all that he can see is that red you get behind your eyelids when you're faced towards the sun. He keeps his eyes closed well after that color has faded, and he tries not to focus on the _sizzling_. Unlike last time, it doesn't last long.

"What," he has to swallow because his tongue feels like sandpaper in his mouth, "was that?"

The voice is particularly close to him when it responds. "The stand, or the creatures?" The Other Giorno then, he supposes, has come over to his side.

"Both." The hand on his shoulder startles him, an unyielding weight that he can almost feel through the fabric of his jacket.

There is a soft hum before the voice answers. "They were vampires. Origins unknown, but most likely out of Time. As it were." He can almost hear the grin, and imagines that lopsided smile from earlier.

"And the stand?"

"Our name," and Giorno would jump if he could, but he is being held in place by a firm grip, "is Requiem. Or Gold Experience Requiem, if you want it in full."

At first he thinks that his eyes are unfocused. And without the tell-tale signs of a breath across his face or the heat of another living body, it takes him longer than he would care to admit to realize that… Requiem is millimeters away from his own face. He has to lean back ever so slightly to be able to appreciate the details of the stand. There is very little about this face that makes him think of Gold Experience. Instead of scarab carapaces there are honest-to-god eyes staring back at him, the eyeballs fully exposed and moving wildly in their sockets. The mouth and the jaw look approximately the same, were he being generous, but the forehead is dominated by the visage of an arrowhead and the helmet has been replaced by some sort of crown.

"Gold… Experience?" Giorno breathes out, one of his hands reaching up to the stand's face but not quite touching.

They move the rest of the distance, and lay their cheek in his palm. "Yes." Those eyes stay still, riveted to his own.

"How did this…?" He trails off, rubbing his thumb over the space where, were it a human's face, there would be a cheekbone. The sensation is neither cold nor warm, and from this distance the haze no longer distorts their body.

"It's a long story."

"And one that we don't have time to get into. Maybe later, Giorno." He would look at his older self, but he finds himself caught in Requiem's gaze. Inside of the sockets he can see that the eyeballs are inlaid in some sort of cross-like structure, and the color of their irises seem to change with each minute tilt of his head.

"What color are your eyes?" he asks instead.

"All of them, and none of them."

"Giorno Giovanna." He finally looks away from that gaze when he hears Bruno's voice. The Other Giorno has turned to face Bruno as well, and he has his shoes clutched in his left hand. Giorno feels his heels itch in sympathy. "Ah," Bruno looks between the two of them. "I meant the… older one."

"Perhaps we should choose names for Guido and myself." Bruno nods and tucks his hair behind his ear in the same motion, tilting his head towards the Other Mista. "You may call me Giovanna."

"Or Boss! Right, Don Giovanna?" Mista bumps their hips together and swings an arm around Giovanna's shoulders, who is shorter by a good several centimeters now that he is no longer wearing heels.

Underneath his fingers Giorno feels a buzz, a faint frisson of movement, almost like sand pouring over his skin. When he looks at Requiem he sees that they have one eyeball rotated to look at their user, and the other is still fixed on himself.

Their lips do not move, but he hears their voice clearly in his head. They sound like a warm whisper across his thoughts, deep in the back of his mind. _Until next we meet, Giorno._ And then, they are gone. He feels their absence keenly, a sudden space that he was not aware of before. Gold Experience materializes by his side, its iridescent green scarab shell eyes a familiar sight. They bump their face into his own, and he rubs their cheeks together. They disappear as quickly as they appeared, and he notes with more than a little relief that no one was watching him, too focused on the conversation between Bruno and the two newcomers.

"I've always wanted a cool nickname," Other Mista says with obvious enthusiasm, waving his hands around. It is only now that Giorno notices his… outfit. Giorno cannot possibly begin to fathom what event Giovanna and this Mista could have been going to, if they were indeed attending it together. Mista's pants are tight skinny jeans similar in style to the pair his younger self is sporting, but instead they are a bright, garish yellow with leopard spots. His shoes are an expensive-looking pair of Chelsea boots, made of what appears to be red leather. While puzzling over the sartorial choices of Mista's lower half, Giorno finds himself following the motion of Mista's arms as they wave around. His muscles are noticeably more pronounced than they were at eighteen. They are perhaps made all the more prominent by the fact that he is wearing a white tank top. A cropped tank, where the offending piece of clothing clearly used to be a tshirt before _someone_ took a pair of scissors to it. Splayed across his chest is, bizarrely enough, Mickey Mouse. In that mouse's smile, Giorno finds no answers.

"We are _not_ calling you Beretta." Giovanna says over Giorno's thoughts.

"Okay, what about Proiettile?"

"If you keep making these horrible suggestions I'm going to call you Insalata, and that will be final." Said Mixed Salad puts his hands up, a gesture that seems to do little in the face of Giovanna's gaze.

"What if we pick something with two syllables?" Bruno suggests, ever the mediator.

"Colpo!" "Sparo!" Narancia and Fugo yell at the same time, thoughtfully maintaining Mista's gun aesthetic.

"If we're going to call Giovanna by his last name," Abbacchio interrupts, putting his hands none-too-gently on the tops of Narancia and Fugo's heads, "then we might as well call him Mista."

Bruno smiles at Abbacchio. "An excellent suggestion. What do you say, Mista? Guido?"

While Bruno gets the two Guido Mistas to accept, Giorno instead focuses on Abbacchio. It may have been the angle, or maybe it was his imagination… Hm. Instead Giorno sees a frown, and searches that face for a moment. But Abbacchio must have felt the scrutiny, and he turns an even deeper frown towards Giorno. Before he can say anything though—

"I'm still going to call you Colpo!" Narancia interjects, shaking the hand off his head.

It takes more than a few moments for the team to settle down. The two Guido Mistas seem to be having a _I'll show you mine if you show me yours_ with their guns and Sex Pistols, and Narancia is excitable, as always. Fugo's eyes are darkened with that same dangerous intent that Giorno saw during the fight against Illuso in the ruins of Pompei, and Bruno has just produced Coco Jumbo from a zipper dimension in his jacket when Giorno speaks up.

"What exactly did you mean when you referred to those people as vampires?" He tries to keep the incredulity out of his mouth, but he knows that he has failed when he hears his voice crack on the last word. Giovanna turns to look at him from where he was watching Guido 1 and Guido 2, and the rest of the team stands quiet and attentive. Small mercies.

"Precisely that," Giovanna says, once again acting as if by virtue of repeating the words he will bestow some wisdom on the rest of them. Evidently Giovanna is aware of the impact of his statement, and he smiles again, this time gesturing at the entire team with a single sweep of his arm. "Is it so hard to believe that in a world where the soul can manifest as a ghostly apparition with supernatural abilities that there might also be vampires?"

There is a certain kind of logic there that Giorno can both appreciate and dislike to the very core of his being. Is someone just born a vampire, and these traits manifest themselves like Gold Experience? Is being a vampire somehow related to stands? What even _is_ a vampire? What can they do? His head throbs with each new question, and he comes to the dull realization that his painkillers are back in his dorm room in Naples.

It is Bruno that speaks up. "These vampires," he says slowly, clearly turning the concept and existence of blood sucking creatures of the night over in his head, "are they related to… The Arrow?"

Giovanna has to turn his head to look at Bruno, and evidently finds this an insufficient way to carry a conversation. He takes a few steps back such that he can look at both Giorno and Bruno at the same time, and because the team had come to crowd around their _capo_ and the Mistas, he essentially has everyone in clear view. Bruno hands Coco Jumbo off to Fugo in order to stretch his forearms and rotate his wrists, and Fugo keeps the turtle secure under his arm and next to his body. Giovanna bends down to carefully place his heels on the ground, but makes no move to put them on.

"No," he says while standing back up and flipping his ponytail behind him, "vampires have nothing to do with Arrows or stands. In fact," and here Giorno sees Giovanna's eyes cut to the side, and follows that gaze to the older Mista, "an individual can both be a vampire and a stand user." Mista's snort is loud, but he shakes his head when the team turns to him questioningly.

Bruno's frown is delicate, and his eyes are downcast. Giorno wishes for a moment that he were closer, if only to be able to put a hand on Bruno's shoulder. When Bruno looks up, Giorno sees that same steely blue gaze that he saw when they discussed their goals and their passions and their dreams back in Naples.

"Is Passione responsible for these vampires?" Bruno brings one hand to rest along his collarbone, and Giorno watches him rub the ridge of his left clavicle.

"Vampires are not a sin that can be attributed to the devil of Passione."

Fugo's face darkens even more. "Correct me if I'm wrong," he says in a terse voice, "but did Mista not refer to you as the Don?"

"He did indeed. What of it?"

"How did you become the Don?"

"How does anyone become the Don?"

Fugo's eyes are as sharp as his words when he responds. "I wouldn't know. For you see, we've only ever had the one."

"Well," Giovanna says, and for a beat it is the only thing he says. "In my experience, which is fairly limited in these kinds of matters, killing the Don seems to be the way to become the Don."

"Which means that you're a traitor." Fugo's eyes seek out Giorno's. "Are you one as well?"

"Fugo," Bruno admonishes. He brings his free hand to Fugo's elbow, and Fugo turns his gaze from Giorno to Bruno. "I personally vetted Giorno, and I trust him with my life."

"That doesn't mean that he can't be a traitor." Abbacchio's voice rings out, deep and distrustful. "I've been trying to tell you this Buccellati, but this kid is clearly bad news. I mean, if we're supposed to believe this guy," he points a finger in Giovanna's direction, "then he clearly joined with an agenda."

Bruno shakes his head, and his hair passes in front of his face like a curtain caught on the breeze. "If Giovanna had to betray the Boss, it must have been because he was forced sometime in the future. Giorno would not betray us." Bruno's eyes come back to Giorno, and stay on him. From his peripheral he can see Giovanna's head turn, presumably to look at both of them. Giorno swallows whatever might have bubbled behind his teeth and instead nods at Bruno's acknowledgment.

"Hey, can we talk about that for a second?" Narancia interjects, waving his hands around to draw attention to himself. There is a beat where Bruno maintains eye contact with Giorno a little longer before turning to Narancia.

"What is it?"

"Ok, so, like. Alright, we have stands." He puts up the thumb of his right hand and uses the pointer of his left to gesture at it, "and Polpo had an arrow that can make stands," the index of his right hand now also goes up, and he gestures to it as well.

"Arrow_s_." Giovanna interrupts.

"Fine, arrow_s_. And now we have vampires," Narancia repeats the same process, but it happens with his middle finger, "and I'm guessing there's got to be a way to make vampires." Now he stops to points at his ring finger. "And then we also have time travel? Like, _Back to the Future_ time travel?" He brings up his pinky and shakes it with his left hand. "_Time travel_ time travel?"

Young Guido snorts, and Giorno has a moment where it reminds him of exactly how older Mista had snorted not too long ago, and says, "Don't hurt yourself there, orange boy."

Giorno turns his attention to his older self and older Mista, to see how they'll react to Narancia's questions. What he sees makes him pause. Both of them have equally strange expressions. Giorno does not know Guido well enough to extrapolate what the facial expressions of a Guido Mista ten years into the future mean, so he focuses on himself. Giovanna has brought a palm to his own cheek, and looks at Narancia with his head tilted and his eyes slightly hooded. Giovanna's expression makes Giorno distinctly uncomfortable, and instead he focuses on the bickering that Guido's comment incited.

Bruno bodily puts himself between Guido and Narancia, looking ever like a parent with unruly children, despite the two and three year age difference between him and the two of them, respectively. Immediately they stop, murmuring apologies and looking suitably chastised.

"I find myself interested in this answer as well," says Bruno. "Is time travel possible?"

Giovanna, who was still looking at Narancia with his cheek in his palm and that strange expression, blinks several times and focuses on Bruno. He removes his hand to shake it side to side at the wrist, indicating some non-committal answer.

"There are plenty of stands who have power over time. Whether that's the case here," Giovanna shrugs, "we don't know. This could also be an alternate dimension, if we assume that our younger selves of our same dimension would remember a meeting such as this."

"Or," Mista interjects, "it's always possible that we might have been forced to forget." Giovanna nods at Mista's explanation.

"Sometimes we would forget what was happening as it was happening," Giovanna adds. "It is not difficult to imagine that our younger selves may have forgotten this encounter entirely."

Fugo steps forward in front of the rest of the team to be closer to Giovanna and Mista. "Am I to understand," he says while handing Coco Jumbo to Guido, "that you're claiming to have gone to an alternate dimension, at a different time than when your dimension is at?"

"I can't say for sure," Giovanna answers. "Requiem explained it, but I'll admit that I was not in a good way, at the time."

"How did they explain it?" Fugo presses.

Giovanna sighs. "Requiem has the ability to return a state to zero. When they felt that there was a… Someone was speeding up time, and when they felt this, in order to turn the speed of time to zero, they went backwards." Giovanna puts a hand on his hip and leans his weight back on one foot. "They also said that the event moving forward was choosing paths, and that by going backwards we also chose paths. I believe that is the gist of what they told me."

Giorno speaks up, not without a little humor. "Do you think they would accept this as evidence for the many-worlds interpretation?"

"Oh," Fugo says, his eyes going back and forth over something that only he can see. "You said that Requiem chose the paths?"

"Yes," Giovanna says.

"Which would mean that the reality you experienced was deterministic." Fugo does not wait to be asked what he means by calling reality deterministic, and instead plows on. "In the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, our universal wavefunction, the superposition of all realities and possibilities, will collapse during the act of observation. This means that the dynamics of a system will either determinately or determinately not have some particular properties. This is a non deterministic process, where reality is some stochastic system that does not have one solution but a family of solutions, and one of these solutions is chosen randomly as the reality we observe. This is," Fugo takes a breath, "the conundrum from where Schrödinger's cat emerges. This quantum superposition cannot possibly extend to our macroscopic scales, and when different quantum histories diverges, the system is decoherent."

"Uh, Fugo," Narancia interrupts. "That… doesn't sound like what Giovanna explained?" Narancia scratches his head, and adjusts his hair band in the same motion. "At least, I think they don't sound the same?"

"That's because it isn't. If we don't have a single quantum timeline, if the merging and collapsing into a single state never happens, then we could instead, theoretically, have a scenario where each and every single solution occurs, and each occurrence is a different branch to a different reality. And some branches are more likely than others, and this observer bias produces a deterministic result. Thus," he gestures at Giovanna, "the Everett interpretation. Or many-worlds, as Giorno said."

Silence follows Fugo's words. The group of them stand there on Via Garibaldi, between Calle Nuova and Calle dei Preti. The bodies that none of them have checked lie somewhere down C. dei Preti, and the streets are illuminated by a few weak lights. It is not the scene where Giorno ever expected to meet himself of the future, or of an alternate world, or of both or neither. Despite his desires, this is what has just happened. He wishes that the night were longer, if only so that they could have more time before their trip to the church on the Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore in the morning.

"Fugo," Abbacchio says in that deep voice of his, the name commanding on his tongue. "This isn't one of your university classes. Keep the philosophizing for the professors."

Fugo prickles with poorly concealed anger. "Apologies if the concepts that I'm describing are too advanced for _some_ of us—"

"Oi!" Bruno barks. "Enough." Silence again. Bruno walks through the center of the group, and then begins to pace. "Why don't you start at the beginning. Could you explain how you got here?"

Giovanna and Mista share a look, clearly communicating something, before turning back to Bruno.

"Sure." Mista responds. "It started when we were on a beach in Florida—"

* * *

He wakes in the sand. His body is pressed deep into its damp embrace, the sound of the tide is off to the side, and his skin feels raw and chafed. The sun is high in the sky, and although he doesn't remember how he got here, he finds it odd that no one had found him or tried to disturb him. It would have made a bizarre sight, to say the least, to see his unconscious body face-down in a particularly thick patch of mountain laurel and seaside goldenrod. It was possible, however, that Gold Experience had hidden his body, because he can only see beach grass growing in tall tufts in the area away from his body. He sits there on his knees, rolling sand between his fingers, and looking at the scenery near him. No Sex Pistols comes to find him, and he can see no Guido.

He gets up, and he notices that he has only one flip flop on. He does not remember even buying the flip flop. He tries to swallow, and finds that his throat is parched and rough. His mouth tastes like a terrible mixture of old sea water and morning breath. In the distance he sees a stretch of black and begins to walk towards it. The effort to get up almost makes him stop. He sees no other people, and it is slow going. The sand is hot from the sun, and he tries to walk on his tiptoes on the foot that has no sandal. He keeps hoping that he will see Guido, but he never does. The black strip asserts itself as a road as he draws closer. He knows that the asphalt will be even hotter than the sand, and so he makes no attempt to walk on it. He follows it all the same though, but off to the side in the sand.

He has no sense of time as he walks. He sees no cars, he sees no people, and the sun does not seem to begin its descent down the sky. His only constant companion is Requiem, whose form shimmers weakly every time he feels particularly faint. His shirt is plastered to his body with sticky sweat, and he stops often to press into Requiem. The metal of their body is cool against his skin, and their eyeballs stay firmly trained on his as he catches his breath.

After some time, Requiem speaks. "There is life energy in this direction." Giorno can see nothing, but he trusts his stand more intimately than he trusts any other living being on the planet. The words make him pant in exhaustion. "Just a little further, Giorno," they whisper into his mind, and their arms come round to pull him closer. His body shakes from the effort.

"I'm so tired." He looks deeper into Requiem's eyes, and cannot tell what color they are.

"Don't worry," he hears in his head, "take all the Time you need." And so he does. He stands there in Requiem's embrace, waiting for the panic to subside and for the feeling to return in his limbs. At some point he sinks to his knees and on to the floor, and Requiem follows, maintaining eye contact all the while.

"Please," he says, or he thinks, and Requiem places one of their hands on his head, and between one brush of their palm over his hair and the next, his thoughts blur into a gurgle of white. His next breath takes him years to breathe, and his eyes stop seeing, and his arms and his legs detach themselves from the rest of him with disarming ease. He floats in this existence and non existence, and he tries to remember. Individual thought is beyond him, but Requiem stirs their fingers through his hair and the water in his brain. He can feel them loosening threads, can feel them probing deep into the flesh of his body, can feel their touch as bright pricks of nerves down his spine, the sensation not unlike being burned with needles of electricity.

He sees in an instant. The hotel room. Their dinner the night before, the phone call with Trish. His shower in the late morning, the drive to the SPW meeting—ah. Something deep inside of him clicks with a terrible shudder, and when he blinks he sees Requiem's face hovering over his. His torso is cradled in their arms, their hands on his head, and his legs lay akimbo in the hot sand.

"Thank you," he says while using them to get up. There is no response, but he knows that they've acknowledged the words. "Do you know what happened on the beach?"

Their voice rattles in their body for a moment before he can hear them clearly.

"We nullified an acceleration of Time."

"By doing what?"

"By accelerating Anti Time." They tilt their head to the side. "By decelerating Time."

"And so we've… gone back?"

"In a sense."

"In a sense?" Giorno echoes.

"The forward motion was not simply in one direction, but following several paths. When We went in the backward motion, We, too, followed several paths." They curl a hand around the base of his skull, and press their fingers into the thick of his hair. "We must get going, if We are to gather Guido."

"He came along too?"

"Only because he was touching Us at the Time." Requiem says, their other hand now rubbing up and down one of Giorno's arms. "He will not be able to come with Us if We do not find him in Time."

Walking is no easier than it was, but Requiem keeps an arm around his waist, and he leans heavily into them.

"Talk to me," he says while pulling his foot off the sand for a long minute. The sound Requiem makes is like the questioning buzz of several hundred bees, a loud drone that rattles throughout their body. "Any idea what caused the acceleration?"

"The epicenter of the event was nearby," they offer.

"How close?"

"Fifteen kilometers."

Giorno turns his head to look Requiem fully in the face. His stomach suddenly feels very cold. "Enrico?" he asks, dreading the answer.

"The stand they had when We meet them," Requiem says, "while powerful over Gravity, did not have its Domain over Time."

Giorno puts his foot down and continues to limp along with the help of Requiem. "Gravity. Is that what they were hoping I would feel? What an odd way to refer to attraction between people."

Requiem buzzes again, and it causes Giorno's limbs to tremble. "We are almost there."

When Giorno finds it in himself to look up, he sees the Speedwagon Foundation offices. In the parking lot is the rental car and nothing else. In the tiny sliver of shade offered by the building he can see a slumped figure, and he knows that it is Guido.

"Requiem," he says, entirely unnecessarily, "look."

Their buzzing gets stronger. "We have been holding Time." Giorno, who had been contemplating how he would get across the black asphalt, freezes at Requiem's words. They worry him more than his earlier thoughts about Enrico.

"What do you mean?"

"We have matched the acceleration of Anti Time to that of Time. In order to move Us away from the danger We must accelerate further backward."

"Oh." Giorno rubs one of his hands up Requiem's back, making circles on their shoulders. "Thank you." He brushes his cheek against their left breast in apology. "Please, just a little further, Requiem."

The buzzing drowns out his thoughts. "We do not have long."

Requiem begins to dissolve the moment he begins to sprint across the parking lot. For each two steps forward he feels his body go one step backward, and his joints groan and creak in disagreement. For no matter how hard he runs, he feels himself slipping through the floor. With an inarticulate yell he kicks off his sandal and feels his feet blister under the full weight and the full contact with the asphalt. He sees gold shimmering above his skin, and knows that he must return Requiem's effort.

When he gets close enough, he makes the leap. His fingers grasp onto Guido's legs just as the world begins to contort and blur in his side vision, and the buzzing overcomes everything else. It shatters his bones with its vibrations, and it causes Guido to quiver with full body tremors on the ground. It shakes Giorno's head so violently he feels like he's swimming, and then he feels a deep pull starting from his fingers and his toes until it reaches his chest. It squeezes. It squeezes so tightly that he forgets how to breathe through the pain, and he sees Guido's face snapping forward to look at him. And then Gravity shifts from under them, and they fall into and through the building, passing out when Gravity shifts again and slams them back into the earth.

* * *

Giorno finds himself in another parking lot. He has no flip flops, and he can't remember why he was expecting to be wearing a pair. He looks around, and sees that he is standing outside of the hotel. He doesn't know the time, or why he's here in soggy clothing. He flicks a piece of seaweed off his arm.

"Giorno!" he hears off to his side, and his head whips around. He gets a mouthful of hair for his efforts, and it tastes like crusty seawater. Guido runs into him before he can do very much but register that yes, the man coming at him is indeed the gunman, and Guido's hands shake Giorno's shoulders. He feels like a ragdoll in the wake of Guido's vigorous greeting.

"Guido," Giorno says, perhaps unnecessarily. "What are we doing here?"

"Oh man, you don't remember?" Giorno shakes his head. "The Speedwagon Foundation thing? Where we got spun around and gravity got all fucked up?" Giorno shakes his head again. "The crunching? Do you remember how we got absolutely squashed?" Another shake. "Boy, I wish I could forget how that felt."

Giorno puts a hand over Guido's mouth. The noise causes his head to throb. Throb more. He's not quite sure which it is. "Should we go back inside?" He finally asks when the drums peter out to a manageable level.

"I don't think we have the keycards." Guido says through Giorno's fingers.

"I imagine we could just ask for more at the front desk. I'm sure they'll remember us."

Guido snorts. "Oh, definitely. If it's that girl from yesterday? She'll absolutely remember you, _Mister Giorno_."

Giorno squints. "I'm afraid I don't remember check-in."

"Now that's another thing I wish I could forget. It was like she took your shirt as a challenge or something. She kept trying to unbutton hers more than yours. You seriously don't remember this?"

"Guido," Giorno says sternly, exasperated.

"Okay, but answer me this." Guido pauses, and puts up an index finger to punctuate his point. "Enrico."

It's not a question, but Giorno answers it all the same. "Yes. What about them?"

"So you remember that guy, but not the weird gravity timey-wimey shit we just experienced?"

"Good grief, Guido. Are you really going to keep bringing that priest up? For the last time, _nothing happened_." Giorno moves his hands off Guido's face. "Come on, let's see if we can get back to our rooms."

They go into the blessedly cool lobby by way of an ostentatiously large revolving door. Guido groans next to him when they catch sight of the front desk.

"It's her. Alright Giorno, go work your magic."

"Don't sound too enthusiastic about this, Guido. I'm dying from all your excitement." Giorno runs a hand through his hair and shakes it out, piling it to the left side and deepening the part. His hair, which already has a natural inclination towards curling, is in what he hopes are artful, beachy waves. He turns to Guido when he's done tousling his hair. "How do I look?"

Guido blinks at him, mouth parted slightly. Giorno has a moment to feel awkward in the pause. It's certainly a bruise to his ego, but he can take the hit. "Uh," Guido supplies helpfully, and licks his lips. "You look good, Boss." His voice wobbles on the title.

"That was very reassuring. Wish me luck." Giorno walks off with Guido to his back, and tries not to show his discomfort at being barefoot in damp swim clothes in a hotel lobby. The receptionist visibly perks up when she sees him.

"Good morning, Mister Giorno," she says in an overly peppy, bubbly voice. The name tag on her left lapel declares her name to be Cindy.

"Buon giorno, Signorina. How are you this fine morning?"

Cindy flips her impressively long ponytail over one shoulder, and Giorno gets distracted by just how pin-straight it is, shiny and black. Did she straighten it? And how long did it take? Would she mind, if he asked? _Focus, Giorno_, he thinks. _You're here for a reason_. Ah, but it couldn't hurt, could it?

"Bella," he says before she can speak, "what product do you use in your hair? It looks wonderful."

She stares at him for a moment, processing. And then she smiles beatifically at him. "It's natural, actually." She preens, running her fingers through her ponytail. "And what about yours? The curls are so wavy."

"Oh, this?" Giorno twists a strand that had come in front of his face around his pointer, and gives it a faux-serious look. "It dried like this from the seawater."

"Very beachy," she says with an over-enthusiastic nod. "It's cute."

Giorno smiles, and he knows how to move his face so that his eyes crinkle at the corners, and that one side of his face dimples more than the other. It's a look he's spent more than a few hours refining. "Speaking of beaches," he leans forward on the receptionist's counter, "it seems I may have misplaced my room card while I was out. Would it be possible to get another?"

"Absolutely. I'll just need some identification and the card that you placed the reservation under."

Giorno tilts his head to the side, and looks up at Cindy. It's not hard to do either because, whether by heels or by nature, the receptionist is much taller than he is. "Therein lies the problem, mia cara. It seems that I've also lost those as well. Or that someone has stolen my clothes and my belongings. Would it be possible—"

"Yes," she interrupts. She looks shocked at her own forthrightness.

"Wonderful. I really appreciate your help."

He hears her click away at her computer. "It's no problem at all. I'm sorry to hear about all your stuff though. How did it happen?"

"That's the strangest part. I don't remember. I got changed and then I have no idea where everything went."

"You didn't lose the Ralph Lauren jumpsuit, did you?"

Giorno can feel one of his eyebrows rise out of its own volition. "Liked that one, did you?"

"Well," she runs a hand through her ponytail again, and plays with the ends for a moment. "It was very beautiful. It was," she pauses to tug on her ponytail, "very striking."

Giorno doesn't even have to pretend to smile at her words, and his lips curl in way that he hopes doesn't come off as too smug. "With your height, I imagine it would look stunning. I have to wear heels to get the same effect."

"Oh, I don't really—I'm not the kind of girl that can pull that kind of stuff off." He hears a click, and she produces two hotel key cards from her desk. "It's mighty kind of you to say that, though." She puts the cards out. Giorno reaches for them, but then decides otherwise. He holds on to her, straightens his back out to look her better in the eyes, and squeezes her hand lightly.

"I think you would look lovely in something like that. And if you want to dress in those sorts of things," he shakes her hand a little, "you should be able to wear what you want."

"Gosh," she says, and he can see her bright eyes darting between his. "It'd be nice to be as pretty as you."

"But you already are. And I just have the money to afford those sorts of things."

Whatever she sees must be enough for her, because her head drifts up and down before she gives a resolute nod. "Alright. I can give it a try."

"That's the spirit!" Giorno takes the cards, and gives her outstretched hand a little pat. "Cindy, I really do appreciate the help. Take care, won't you?"

"You betcha. I hope you can find your stuff, Mister Giorno." Someone behind them gives a little cough, and Giorno turns around to see an older man waiting in line. The man has a quite frankly ridiculous number of golfing bags, and none of the physique to go with them. He turns back to the receptionist.

"Have a good morning." Giorno says. She echoes his words, and focuses on the next customer, giving the man a patented on-the-job smile and greeting. Giorno returns to Guido.

"How'd it go?" Guido asks when Giorno gets close enough. He fans out the two key cards in his hand. "What are we waiting for? Let's get a move on."

They forgo the elevator in favor of the stairs, and because of the awkward slightly-shorter-than-usual height, Giorno ends up taking two steps at a time. He feels the faint pressure of _something_ beneath the soles of his feet, but when he looks at the skin there he doesn't see anything out of the ordinary. It's perhaps a tad drier than usual, but it's nothing a pumice won't fix. They reach their rooms in relatively short order, and the door clicks open with a flashing green light. Giorno pushes into his room, and his suitcase is shoved against the armoire, and the bed sheets are a tangled mess on the floor. The door to the bathroom is not entirely closed, and Giorno can hear the shower running inside. The digital clock on the bedside table blinks out that it is five past eleven, and Giorno turns to look at Guido, who had stayed in the threshold of the room.

"Are we…" Giorno begins to say but is cut off when he feels a dull throb race across his temple.

"I think we're back to yesterday. Before the SPW meeting." Giorno stares at Guido, uncomprehending. "God, Giorno," Guido steps into the room and closes the door behind him, "this is a really bad time for you to have selective amnesia. Requiem? Can you do something?"

The dull throb blooms across Giorno's vision, causing it to burst into darkness. He grasps out with a hand and grabs onto Guido's shoulder, moaning into the pain. Requiem peels out of out of his skin, and he feels like he's being scored with a hot knife.

"We are holding an acceleration of Time," Requiem says as they separate from his body, and they place a firm hand on top of Giorno's head. "We must conserve energy for the next deceleration."

"We're going to go further back?"Guido asks, lowering the volume of his voice to just barely a whisper.

"Yes."

"Do you know how many times this is going to happen?"

"As many as We need. We need to escape the Ripples."

Giorno can feel Guido place an arm around his waist, and he leans in to the contact. "How much time do we have?" he asks Requiem. He gets a buzz in response. "Until the next jump?" he clarifies.

"Not long. You should hurry."

Giorno cracks open an eye and finds Guido staring down at his face. Guido's eyes are familiar, as is the bridge of his nose and the curve of his lips. If only the situation was as familiar as Guido. Time travel? Sometimes he wishes he could be involved in a job with a little less supernatural occurrences. But such is the reality of his existence, it seems.

"I have baby wipes. Somewhere in my luggage. It won't be as good as cleaning, but it's a start, right?" Guido looks at Giorno as he speaks, but doesn't move. Requiem's buzzing gets louder, and the noise sears through Giorno like a bolt. "That's the sound they made last time," he says with a rush, pulling away from Guido's embrace and stumbling to his bags. He snags a few wipes before tossing to box behind him, somewhere in Guido's direction. He starts to strip and wash himself off as best he can, but already his skin has a gummy, clammy feeling to it. Right there, near the top of his clothes, his eyes snag on the DVF jumpsuit—the very one that he couldn't find yesterday morning. He gasps when he sees his white Louboutins. "Guido," he exclaims while shucking off his shorts and immediately slipping his legs into the jumpsuit, "this has already happened! Yesterday I couldn't find my clothes, and this must have been why—we must have already—" Giorno looks up, and he finds Guido standing there, wipes at his feet. "Guido?" Giorno asks while pulling the jumpsuit up past his hips.

This seems to snap Guido out of whatever haze he had fallen in to. The effects of the time jumping must have just reached him, like some kind of delayed jet-lag. Guido shakes his head, and his short dark curls bounce with the movement.

"I'll just, uh, go back to my room and grab some clothes." Guido bends down to pick up the wipes, and Requiem chooses that moment to place a hand on Guido's upper back, between his shoulder blades.

"You must hurry," they say, startling Guido into fumbling the box. He scuttles out of the room faster than an Australian tiger beetle, and Giorno stands there, jumpsuit pooled at his hips, utterly confused.

Requiem's buzzing causes Giorno to hurry again, and he grabs a hair tie to put his tacky hair into a ponytail. He shoves a handful of his Imitrex pills into one of his hidden side-seam pockets, and he nestles the bottle in between the shoes roughly where he remembers finding it after his shower yesterday morning. Or today morning. _Whichever_ day it was, he tries to put the bottle where he found it. He also grabs a blazer because, despite the heat of the day, he remembers how cold it can be, when it's wet and in the middle of the night. He paws through his bag, looking to see if he needs anything else. His hands find his tiny jewelry bag, and he spares a thought to Liliya, who had watched the zipper swing back and forth on his other jumpsuit. That zipper, however, was a replica. A pale imitation of the real thing, no matter how good an imitation it is. He pulls the real one out of the bag, which had long ago been converted to a piercing, and slips it on. It's hidden by his jumpsuit in the front. Luck has his eyes sliding over his wallet before he leaves, and he portions himself out half of the American dollars and Euros, leaving the other half with his other self. In the event that somehow what he is experiencing is some divergence and that this version of himself does not get sent to the past, he will undoubtedly need money as well. Giorno gives the room a parting sweep and then hurries into the hall and to Guido's door, Requiem close by his side.

The buzzing has gotten unbearably loud again. It drills into his skull. Guido cracks the door open on the first knock, and he doesn't even have the chance to comment on Chelsea boots paired with a Disney World tank top before Requiem is whisking the both of them away. The process is both more and less painful than before, but blessedly Giorno does not remain conscious for long.

* * *

"And that about sums it up," Mista says with a careless shrug of his shoulders, the motion of which is fully visible in his terribly ripped tank top. At some point during Giovanna's and Mista's re-telling of their past few days the group of them had moved to the room inside of Coco Jumbo's shell, but not before Bruno had found the tortoise a nice fountain to sit and swim in. Giorno had appreciated the thought.

Giorno imagines that they have not been told the whole story, and he has these suspicions based entirely around the fact that apparently, even with a whole extra decade, he has not changed in terms of how he looks when omitting information. Giovanna's frown may have been small, but it was all that Giorno needed.

"This is…" Bruno trails off. One of his legs is over his other knee, and he has his hands folded in his lap. The rest of them had squished onto the couch with their captain, Bruno being the furthest on one side, and Abbachio having secured the coveted position immediately to Bruno's right. The rest of them had somehow ended up sitting on the couch in order of their ages, whether intentionally or not, Giorno doesn't know. Trish sits off to Bruno's side in one of the extra chairs, and Giovanna and Mista have commandeered the two armchairs on the other side of the coffee table.

Abbacchio supplies his own interpretation for how Bruno's sentence may have ended. "It's a load of horseshit, is what it is. You honestly expect us to believe all this?"

"I don't need you to believe us—I just need you to work with us." Giovanna says.

Abbacchio snorts, but is cut off by Fugo. "Assuming we believe you, what exactly do you want us to do? This really sounds more like _your _problem, rather than ours."

Giovanna tilts his head towards Fugo. "Not an inaccurate observation, by any means." Giorno, by virtue of being on the opposite end of the couch and thus furthest from Bruno, is the closest to Giovanna. Giovanna's face seems remarkably open without the curls obscuring his forehead, and Mista looks downright unrecognizable without the cap.

Fugo re-crosses his legs. "That's it? You're not going to say anything else?"

"Panna," Mista says, "what could we possibly say? It's not like we came into this with speeches and stuff prepared to make you believe us. If it weren't for accidentally running into you in an alleyway, we wouldn't even be having this conversation right now."

Giovanna's right brow twitches. Slightly, and along the arch, but enough for Giorno to see it. A benefit of his own hair, which falls over his brow line. He rubs his fingers into his palms, his hands hidden in the pockets of his pants. He wonders. He wonders what kind of man he must be, to somehow have plans for the unimaginable. He wonders what has happened, a decade into the future. He makes no effort to point out the twitch to the rest of the group. It wouldn't be worth it.

Giovanna puts a hand out, palm up. "It would be, after all, irresponsible of us to get you all involved in our affairs. Especially when considering how young—"

"Hey!" Narancia interjects both verbally and physically, pinwheeling his arms into Fugo's and Guido's faces. "I'm older than most of the rest of—"

Guido shoves Narancia bodily into Fugo, and lies on top of both of them with the full force of his weight. "Shut it, pipsqueak. In case you haven't noticed, I'm older than you. In fact—"

Guido's head snaps back from the force of Fugo's punch, and he stares at Fugo mutinously for a few moments before getting off of the other two. Giorno hears Bruno's sigh, even from his spot on the other end of the couch.

"They are a competent crew," Bruno says, eyes bright and blue, "and the most loyal men that I know."

"I apologize. I meant no offense."

Bruno waves a hand at Giovanna's words. "Now. Tell me how we can help you."

"I believe that it would be to everyone's benefit if we instead told you how we can help you." Giorno's nails dig into the palms of his hands. Did Giovanna mean about their plans…?

Mista leans forward with a laugh, and places his elbows on his knees. "You didn't think that we don't know about your current mission, did you?"

Bruno's eyes dart to Giorno's, so quickly that he almost misses it. "What do you mean?" he asks.

It's Fugo that answers Bruno's question with one of his own. "Are you implying that you've already done what we're currently doing?"

"There's no implying about it. Minus the whole meeting-ourselves-from-the-future, we've done this all." Mista says with obvious and infectious enthusiasm from where he's perched his chin on top of his hands.

Giorno turns his sights to Giovanna and sees none of the hallmarks that one would associate with happiness. He knows well enough that he himself has been called dour-faced, or serious, or bored, even when he personally thought that his enjoyment was obvious, but he sees none of his usual expressions on that face across from him. It's not an expression he would associate with a Giorno that knows the path to success.

Giovanna's gaze cuts sharp to his own, and must have felt the intensity of his inspection. "What you face is no easy task. I had hoped that I would be able to speak to Bruno alone, but as that is not the case, I need you all to listen carefully."

Bruno stops any bickering before it can start. "We're listening."

"The boss will betray you again." Bruno does not look surprised at Giovanna's words. "Your real mission is to deliver Trish to the Boss, so that he may kill her himself."

Trish, who had been sitting quietly in her spot near Bruno, jerks with surprise, as if Giovanna's words had slapped her. She recoils from Bruno's side, pressing herself further into her chair. "Did you know?" she asks in a voice so low that Giorno has to lean forwards in order to hear her, but even then he's not sure he didn't imagine what she said. Bruno's eyes grow wide at her words, and his mouth opens, but he says nothing. Giorno can see her tremble in her seat, hands making claws on the arms of her chair.

"Trish," Bruno says, equally softly. He reaches a hand out in her direction, but she uses her feet to push herself and the seat away from him. Bruno brings his hand back to himself, and it shakes, an unsteady fist in his lap. "I swear that if had I known, I would have _never_ brought you like a, a—"

"We don't _actually_ know if the Boss wants to kill Trish. The only information we have is a single sentence from some guy we don't even know." Fugo says, standing from his spot on the couch. "We have a mission, from the Boss, and we have someone, if we believe him, who is a traitor to Passione. Of course he wants us to start fighting like this, or consider becoming traitors."

Abbacchio nods, arms crossed in front of his chest. "Fugo's right. We have a mission to complete. Betraying the Boss would just put a target on our backs, and I'm not going to do that based on intel like this."

Giorno watches Bruno, who has not taken his eyes off Trish. She has her head down, chin tucked into her chest, legs half pulled up and onto her seat. Giorno sees the glint in Bruno's eyes, and the wetness of it causes him to bite his lip. He watches Bruno frown, and his face creases so terribly that Giorno can feel an answering swell in his own throat, an embarrassing ball of phlegm that will stop him from saying anything, for fear of his voice sounding broken and congested.

"Trish," Bruno says, and for a moment it looks like he will go to her side. Instead he sits on the coffee table with a heavy sigh, and he leans down to grip one of its corners in his fist. His back, lean and tall, straight and firm, is towards Giorno. His face is towards Trish. "I can't even imagine how difficult this must be for you." Giorno bites into his lip harder, and he can feel that everyone has stopped to watch these two. The sound of their breathing is suffocating. This is a conversation that the two of them should be having alone, and the rest of them are taking something by being accidental voyeurs. "I know that you don't have any reason to trust me, but I need you to believe me when I say that I didn't know, and that I would never hurt you like that. You have to understand, I thought that I was reuniting parent with child."

Trish looks at Bruno, and then looks away. Her gaze rolls off to the side, and it snags on Giorno. She looks at Giorno, and then back again to Bruno. He doesn't know what she sees, but she must have seen something, either in his face, or in Bruno's face. And she must have seen something that she believes.

"Please," she says, and her face crumples, and her nose scrunches, and the whites of her eyes are almost as pink as her hair.

"I promise that I will protect you."

Trish nods her head, and for a few long moments the two of them stay there. Bruno, on the coffee table, and Trish, slowly scooching her chair back to the group.

"Alright," Bruno says in a voice that burns through Giorno likes a northern wind off ice. He turns around to face Giovanna. "Tell me what he plans to do."

Fugo sits back down with not a word, and Abbacchio straightens in his seat. Even Narancia and Guido have stopped their bickering game of hand slaps, and Giorno controls his breathing as quietly as he can. Giovanna appears unphased, but even Mista seems to twitch at the command.

"The Boss will give you his next instructions via the laptop. He will say that only one of you can enter the church with Trish, and sometime between you," Giovanna waves in Bruno's general direction, "and Trish going in, he steals Trish and you chase him to the basement. I know there will be a fight, and when I rushed in to the church to check on you, you were badly hurt." Giovanna's lips are curled into a slight frown and inside Giorno sweats. He feels the shakes deep in his bones, and he puts his hands back into his pockets, clenching and unclenching them out of sight of everyone else.

Bruno's eyes are keen. "Anything else?"

"None of us were there for the fight, but it seemed that the Boss must have left when we all went in to find you. You had Trish with you, but she was apparently unconscious for the entirety of it. Afterwards, you gave us a choice: to follow you, or to leave. You made sure that we understood that we had no obligation to turn traitor under your command."

Bruno sits back down in his previously vacated spot. He puts his head in his hands and closes his eyes, and they all hear him breathe deep through his nose. Eyes still closed, he speaks, "We will operate under the assumption that what you say is true." The gang collectively begins to speak up, but Bruno puts up one of his hands and the squabbling stops immediately. "I will go in with Trish, and if the Boss attacks, I will attack him. You don't have to follow me. You have until tomorrow morning to make your decisions."

Utter silence. Bruno's eyes are still closed. His lashes, dark and thick, fan out over his cheeks. Giorno looks at that face, and the way that hair curls around Bruno's chin and forehead, and knows his answer. He thinks that he would follow this man into death, if he had to. That knowledge burns into him, and it leaves him hollow with the ashes. He feels weak with it, the desire to follow this man to the ends of the Earth. But he also feels emboldened by it, and the fact that Bruno would do the same. For their shared dream.

Giovanna speaks up. "I believe that I speak for both Mista and myself when I say that we will be there to follow you and provide support."

"You better believe that we'll be there," Mista says, thumbing his nose. Bruno tilts his head in acknowledgment of the words, but offers no other thoughts.

"After all, we've already defeated the Boss once," Giovanna says.

"Defeated?" Fugo asks. "Not killed?"

"The details of the fight are… complicated. In essence, he will experience the pain of the process of death, but he will never actually experience the truth of his death. I imagine that even now he is somewhere, experiencing some other version of a possible death."

"This is what has been bothering me," Fugo says. He shakes his head. "Among other things. How _exactly_ did this happen?"

"I believe that earlier I mentioned the abilities of Requiem."

"Yes, you did. But the ability to return a state to zero is not the same as, what, a perpetual cycle of infinite deaths?"

"The technicality lies in that Requiem nullified the Boss' death to zero. The actual moment of _I am dead_ will never happen. Instead he will know what it is like to _be_ dying, but never to experience that single definitive state of death."

Fugo squints at Giovanna, mouth pulled into an angry frown. "Nobody can say _I am dead_, that defeats the whole point of being dead. Everyone, everywhere, will experience dying, but nobody is conscious of the exact moment they die. When you say that Requiem denied the Boss the _truth_ of his death… nobody knows the truth of their death, because they die before they can even say _I am dead_. I don't understand how what Requiem did is a… unique ability, in that respect."

Giovanna smiles, and Giorno stares at it in fascination. Open, bright, with teeth flashing behind those lips. "It sounds like you've been reading some Derrida. But no matter. Regardless of the details, let us say that the Boss will experience the pain of an infinite number of deaths, and that he will never experience the pleasure of being released from his suffering. How does that sound?"

"It sounds like," Abbacchio cuts in, purple lips pulled back from his teeth, "you're some armchair philosopher more concerned about semantics than our situation."

Giovanna shakes his shoulders, but the motion is mostly hidden by his blazer. "Believe you me, I take the threat of the Boss very seriously. And I will defeat the Boss once again, using Requiem."

"That overconfidence is going to get you killed," Abbacchio says into the silence following Giovanna's words, deep voice filling the room. "And it's going to take the rest of us down with you. There's a reason nobody's been successful in deposing him before."

"As far as you are aware of."

Abbacchio lets out a gusty breath. "Sure, as far as I'm aware of. And as far as I'm aware of, this is the actual reality that I live in, and this is what we're going to have to deal with."

"Abbacchio," Mista cuts in, "you're worse than a dog with a bone. Can you give it a rest? Bruno's already made his decision, and it's up to the rest of you to make yours."

Giovanna cuts a sly smirk towards the older Mista. "We both know the best part of a bone is the marrow, Guido."

"Does it look like I've got a plate ossobuco and polenta?" Mista gestures to himself and then to the area surrounding him.

Abbacchio closes his eyes with a deft roll heavenward and a particularly forceful grunt. "Anyways, I've already made up my mind. I want nothing to do with either of you."

"I'm surprised, Abbacchio," Giovanna says, "you never struck me as one to turn away from Bruno."

Abbacchio snorts. "Fuck you, and clean your ears out. I said that I wasn't going to work with you two, not that I wasn't going to follow Buccellati."

Bruno opens his eyes, and they find Giorno's. Giorno's awareness coalesces and focuses into that single look, and it cuts him deeper than anything anyone has ever done or said to him. It's the kind of cut that's so sharp you aren't even aware of it when it happens, but it causes blood to bubble up in a fine, hot line. This is the bubbling, this look between them, those eyes, so bright, so blue, and he knows the blood will be soon to follow.

"There's no need to be so hasty. You have all night to make your decisions. Speaking of which," Bruno says, finally breaking eye contact with Giorno, "we should perhaps settle down."

"I'll take first watch," Giorno offers.

Bruno nods. Smiles. "Thank you. Anything else?"

"Yes," Giovanna says as he stands in one fluid motion, and Mista follows in short order. "We will be going. We have some business to attend to, but we'll see you in the morning."

"Giovanna, I didn't say this before, but I'll say it now. This is my mission, not yours. You should deal with getting back home."

"You would not be able to stop me from following you, even if you tried," Giovanna says with a smile. "You should see us out though, as one boss to another."

Mista grins, wide and infectious. "See you all bright and early tomorrow. Or is it today?" He clearly knows the answer to his question, and gives them all a cocky salute with a couple of his fingers before leaving the room inside Coco Jumbo's shell. Giorno can't miss this chance.

"May I…?" he asks, pushing up and heading towards them. Giovanna looks at him with warm eyes, and Giorno feels uncomfortable in that gaze. He also feels a pressure in the back of his head, and it reminds him of when Requiem spoke into his mind.

"Of course, Giorno." The three of them go outside to join Mista. The rest of the team stays inside, suspiciously silent.

Coco Jumbo has somehow found itself on the lip of the fountain, and they all scramble not to fall inside the fountain and into the water. It seems that Mista had had little success, because his pants are a darker stained yellow along the side of his hip, presumably from when he fell down. He runs a hand through his hair, sheepish but unrepentant, when Giovanna clicks his tongue.

"I suppose this is good night," Giovanna says, and he puts a hand out to Bruno. "We'll see you in the morning. We'll be waiting for you at the dock."

Bruno takes Giovanna's hand, but neither of them shake. "What are you going to do?"

"Well," Giovanna shakes his head, "we need to check to see if there are any vampires in the area that we may have been brought back with us. After that we'll try to find a hotel, if it's not too late. Or early, I suppose."

Mista heaves a large, exaggerated sigh. "Our work's never done. Can you believe this slave driver?" Mista looks at Giorno, and the attention startles him. "But what can you do? Anyways, we better get going. The longer we chit chat the longer I'm going to have to stay up. And I've already been up for ages."

It's Giovanna's turn to look chagrined, and he withdraws his hand from Bruno's. "I apologize, Guido." He turns his gaze to Giorno. "We can speak tomorrow, after all this. I know you must have questions."

If this has all been some kind of phantasmagorical dream he's sure that it will come to an end as soon as Giovanna and Mista leave. Come the morning, they will have to deal with the Boss. He imagines that there won't be time to talk then. And what about after the fight? The others had made it abundantly clear that it was the _after_ that was the problem. And they had not discussed any plans. Even if they managed to do the impossible, to kill the Boss, they'd have to deal with the others—those that had wanted to replace the Boss themselves, and those that were still loyal to a man in the ground. Giorno meets Giovanna's gaze, and finds himself paralyzed with the thoughts of eventualities.

And then Giovanna is stepping in to his space, an unobtrusive presence. Giorno feels the kiss to the crown of his head, and he feels Giovanna's hands touch his shoulders. The touch causes his mind to jitter, and shudder to a halt. The pressure in the back of his head deepens.

"Stay safe, Giorno." Giovanna murmurs, and then the two of them are off. They move quickly in sync with one another, and disappear down the alleyway where the vampires were killed ages ago. Their shoes are the only noise either of them make, and Giorno sits down on the lip of the fountain to grab Coco Jumbo out of the water. He makes leaves of lettuce from a few of the coins in the water, and Coco Jumbo tears into them before he can even properly offer them to the tortoise. Bruno looks down the alley into which the other two disappeared.

He looks up at the sky. It is dark, filled with stars. There are street lights obscuring his view, and the sound of people speaking and gurgling water breaks the quiet. He watches, and it seems like a star breaks through the darkness, and shoots across before fading into oblivion, obliterated to dust by the atmosphere.

"That's supposed to be good luck, you know." Bruno says, and he sits down next to Giorno, so close that Giorno can feel the heat through his suit jacket and pants. The star is gone, having already lived and died its short life, but the afterimage superimposes itself on Giorno's vision, and he sees it while looking at Bruno. It's too dark to appreciate the details of Bruno's face, but he has already enjoyed it enough to know the geography of it, the placement of Bruno's nose, of his brow, of his cheeks.

"We're supposed to make a wish, aren't we?" He asks, knowing the answer.

Bruno hums. "And what would you wish for, Giorno Giovanna?"

"It won't come true if we say it out loud." Bruno laughs, and he pats Giorno's shoulder. He reaches over to take Coco Jumbo, and Giorno feels strands of hair wisp over his face. Bruno pulls away just as quickly as he reached over.

"And if there was a second star, what would your second wish be?"

"I would wish for," Giorno breathes in deep and slow, and then breathes out, "choice."

Bruno makes an interested but confused sound. "Choice?"

"It seems like everyone on the team is here because they ran out of options. I don't know their full stories, but," Giorno pauses, measuring his words. "I approached you with my dream, consciously, under the force of my own will. I didn't—nothing was forcing me to join the mafia."

"Of that, I am well aware," Bruno says, amusement in his voice.

"Right. But for everyone else? And all the other people? They're forced into these situations, and they have to make decisions that they wouldn't have otherwise made, and it's not… it's not _fair_." Giorno's voice cracks, and he swallows in embarrassment. He feels Bruno take one of his hands, and the touch causes him to startle.

"No, please, don't stop on my account. I just thought your hands might be cold." Bruno reaches for the other, as if to prove his point. He cups both of Giorno's between his own palms, and Giorno does indeed feel his icy fingers begin to warm up. "Go on," Bruno says.

Giorno's eyes have adjusted to the darkness, and he can see Bruno watching him. He looks down at his lap to avoid that gaze, but ends up looking at their hands. "We shouldn't be doing this to people, destroying their lives and then punishing them for the things they have to do after we've made them do it. The politicians have failed us, the system is designed against us, and there are people that revel in being cruel." Giorno takes a fortifying breath. "If there was a second star, that's what I'd wish for. Choice. The choice to do what we want with our lives, without being forced into situations where we end up hating ourselves and what we have to do. That's no way to live our lives, regretting everything that we've done."

"Giorno," Bruno says on an exhale, in a sound so soft that Giorno would have never heard it if they weren't so close, "you are filled with a passion that I find inspiring. You really love people, don't you?"

Giorno feels himself blush at Bruno's words. "Well, I wouldn't—I don't know if I'd phrase it that way—"

"No, I think that's the best way to say it. It takes a deep love of people to be so upset at all the hurts that they have to face. And your stand!"

"What about Gold Experience?" Giorno turns his face back to Bruno, and he finds himself compelled to look into those eyes, despite his previous embarrassment.

"Don't you see, Giorno? You give life, you don't take life. You love life so much that your soul responded to that love and gave you Gold Experience."

"I," Giorno licks his lips, and wishes that his hands were free so that he could hide them in his pockets. He feels his heart pound, and hopes that Bruno can't feel it through the skin of his wrists. His pulse shakes worse than a dappled willow's branches during monsoon season. "I don't think stands work that way," he finally ends up saying, after reigning in his thoughts.

Bruno squeezes his hands before moving his grip to Giorno's wrists. "For you? I think that's exactly what happened." Bruno's eyes are dark with the night, but Giorno sees them clearly all the same.

* * *

A/N: I can finally tag this as brugio, albeit slow, slow, slow burn. "But flavoredice," i hear u asking, "which giorno?" to which i remind u that bruno has not one (1), but two (2) hands.

this was a much faster update than ever should be expect. im writing this fic instead of my thesis proposal

Also, forgot to thank mosterkissed on my first chapter, which is a grave oversight on my part… without them i would never have felt compelled to write any of this down, and you all have them to blame when i start rambling about whatever i feel like. Uve been warned

to monsterkiss: u kno what uve done


	3. Funny, it's not a star I see

Beyond the initial few vampires that they had found before running into their past selves, they had not discovered anymore. It would have been better had they seen any, if only so they could tell themselves that they hadn't caused vampires to run through the streets of Venice at night. There had been a few hotels still open for tourists near Piazza San Marco, and thankfully Italy of late March in 2001 existed in that strange dual circulation period of both lira and Euro having legal tender status. Luckily the receptionist had either not looked at their notes too closely or was largely unfamiliar with how a 2001 Euro note was supposed to look like, and they had gotten their overpriced room and collapsed into bed. The bathroom was an unmitigated plus over staying with the others in Coco Jumbo's room. There was unfortunately no time to ask for dry cleaning services, and Giovanna and Mista had rented a boat not long after the sun had peeked over the horizon. They are waiting at the dock of Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore before the others.

It's cool out on the boat, and the light glints bright off the water's surface. Giovanna finds himself shutting his gummy eyes and leaning into Mista not long after they've stopped the boat. Mista does the same. Time seems to compress in that funny way it does when you're sleepy but trying to stay awake. The rocking of the boat and the dripping of water should serve as at least a way to mark time, but only serves as some of the most painfully loud white noise Giovanna has had the displeasure of being subjected to. His fingers are cold in the early morning air and, to his syrup slow mind, pressing them into Mista's side seems like an excellent idea. Mista jolts at the touch, cursing under his breath about icicles, but Giovanna shushes the other back into silence. In the spaces between one breath and another, it's easy to pretend that this is all some very strange, foggy dream. But, as do all dreams, they must eventually come to an end. This dream happens to end when they hear the soft putter of another boat, and the two of them look out across the water.

The sun is higher, but still hangs low over the water. Giovanna finds his eyes pulled to Bruno, whose bright white suit is illuminated in the light, cutting a sharp figure. Narancia points at their boat and then proceeds to wave when he sees them watching him, and Giovanna carefully extricates an arm to wave back, much more subdued. Giorno also waves in greeting, and the younger Guido hangs off the side of the boat, grinning at them.

"Getting awfully cozy there. You guys actually awake enough to do any work?"

"Respect your elders," Mista snaps back, groaning as he stands up and stretches out.

Guido snorts. "You sound like an old man. What are you, thirty?"

"Twenty-eight." Mista leans forward to the others on their boat, causing it to wobble suspiciously under Giovanna. "With age comes experience. And don't you forget it." The other boat pulls up next to theirs, and the engine noises echo in the air for a few moments after it's been turned off. Bruno looks down at Giovanna, who has yet to uncurl his legs from his spot sitting down. It had been a very comfortable position.

"Good morning," Bruno says. Mista and Giovanna echo the sentiment back. Giovanna spares one mournful thought to his hotel bed and gets up as well. "We got the instructions, as you said we would, sometime early in the morning." Bruno says after watching Giovanna shake the sleep from his limbs.

_How have their choices changed, with the added benefit of time?_ Giovanna thinks to himself, keeping the words out of his mouth. He won't pry, it's not his place. He'll know when he leaves the church later in the morning, anyways. "You should know that I will be going into the church a minute after you do," Giovanna says.

Bruno nods in acknowledgment. "I had assumed as much."

Fugo looks none too impressed at Giovanna's words. "The Boss' message stated that any deviation, even if accidental, would be taken as intent to harm him. Wouldn't going in just cause him to attack, regardless of what he was actually going to do?"

"He would attack me then, and not you." Giovanna says.

"_Me_," Giorno repeats. "Not the both of you?"

Giovanna brings a hand to Mista's shoulder. "No. Guido will stay here, in case I fail. He will stop the Boss if he gets outside the church. I will take a few of Sex Pistols with me though." Giovanna feels No. 7 vibrate in his pocket, and then they poke their head out to wave at the group.

"Don't worry!" They call out in their tiny high-pitched voice, "we'll protect him." Abbacchio mutters something under his breath, too quietly to be heard.

"How do you plan to follow us up to the top of the bell tower?" Bruno asks. "There are no stairs, and we will have taken the only elevator up."

"I'll be going to the basement." Bruno gives him a questioning look. "The Boss will escape with Trish down there. I intend to ambush him."

Narancia sighs, deep and suffering. "And here I was hoping that we could sample some of Venice's food. Just this morning Mista was telling me all about their squid ink pasta and seafood salads—"

"Narancia," Bruno interrupts, "I need you to keep an eye on your radar."

"Oh! Yes, sorry boss. I'll focus. Nothing's going to get past me!"

Giovanna lets his eyes linger on Narancia, in all his youthful exuberance. Narancia catches him staring, begins to smile, but then stops, brows furrowed in confusion. Giovanna tries to ease his face into something natural and less serious, but he must not be successful, if Naranica turning his head away is any indication. With his attention on Narancia, he misses Giorno getting up.

"Buccellati," Giorno says, moving closer to Bruno, "I volunteer to be her bodyguard in the tower." Bruno stares at Giorno. Giovanna watches the two of them, and distinctly feels out of place.

He remembers this scene, although the details seem to have changed in time, different from what he has seen in his mind for all these years. He remembers the sun, bright, illuminating Bruno from behind. He remembers watching the sweat trickle down Bruno's cheek. He remembers a determined gaze, returning his. He remembers the shake in his limbs, pains from the Ghiaccio fight. He has traced over these memories more times than he can count, with little satisfaction.

Here, in this bizarre present, he sees the bags under Bruno's eyes. He sees the curve of Bruno's ear from under his dark hair, he sees the greasy strands that have clumped at Bruno's temple, he sees the faint scars on Bruno's upper lip. He doesn't remember these details, and they burn into his memory. He makes sure of it. He looks at Bruno to the exclusion of all else. He found no satisfaction in memories, but in the now, he doesn't need memories. Maybe he will finally find his satisfaction here.

He has to detach himself from his desires to focus on the others around him, and he resents Abbacchio more clearly than he has anyone else in recent memory.

"Who the hell do you think you are?" Abbacchio asks in a gruff voice, grabbing Giorno's shoulder and pulling it roughly back. Giovanna watches the surprise bloom in Bruno's face before turning his attention to his younger self. "Buccellati's the boss, so of course he's going to take her, you dumbass." Abbacchio shoves a finger in Giorno's face, who has to tilt his head in order to avoid it. "The only reason the Boss didn't specify who would go in is because he doesn't know who's still alive or not." Giovanna sees Giorno raise a brow at Bruno. Bruno stares back, and Giovanna watches another careful bead of sweat as it makes its way down Bruno's chin and neck.

"Of course I'll go," Bruno says, bringing a hand up to his chest. He turns to his right, where Trish has been sitting without a word. "All right, Trish. The two of us will go, and, hopefully, there will be no problems." Trish gets up, as silent as she's been all morning. She waits for Bruno on the stairs. He stops half in and half out of the boat, and Giovanna has the distinct sense of second hand embarrassment, looking between his younger self and Bruno. Their looks are none too subtle.

"Oh, Giorno," Bruno says, and Giovanna thinks Bruno's next words as he says them, "could you give me that charm to wish me good luck on this final mission?" Bruno says this with one hand on his hip and the other outstretched, pointing at one of Giorno's ladybug brooches. Giovanna remembers this as well. The confusion at having someone else tell him the meaning of ladybugs, as if he hadn't carefully combed the school library for all their books on the _Coccinellidae_ before choosing to pin them to his jacket. He knows now that Bruno had probably said it for the benefit of the others, and that a superstitious belief would be less alarming than telling the others outright that the two of them had been stretching the interpretation of the Boss' instructions as thin as they could. He wonders at the need for deception here, in a world where the gang is already aware of the Boss' predilections, but he supposes this is indeed another case of Bruno trying to not draw overt attention to his and Giorno's plans.

"Ladybugs," Bruno continues, undeterred, "are considered sun bugs. Symbols of life, and good luck charms. Isn't that right, Giorno?"

Giovanna watches Giorno close his eyes, smile tugging at the edges of his lips. "That's right. Ladybugs will bring you good luck." Giorno takes longer than he needs to in order to clip off the brooch. Giovanna remembers how hard he had worked to keep the glow of Gold Experience's ability hidden. "Here you go, Buccellati." Bruno clips the ladybug on faster than Giorno had taken it off. _Ah_, but to be that brooch on Bruno's left breast.

Giovanna's eyes get caught watching the movement behind Giorno, and this is something he doesn't remember very well. Giorno doesn't turn around to look at Fugo.

"Buccellati," Fugo says with a strange glint in his eye.

"What is it?"

"I thought this was a good opportunity to say this." Fugo closes his eyes, chest moving visibly with a deep breath.

Bruno turns back towards Fugo. "Why so formal? What is it?"

"I knew that someday you'd be made into _capo_, and I know that you'll complete this mission as you see fit." Abbacchio makes a humming noise of agreement, and Giovanna sees what is perhaps the only smile he's ever seen the other man make, "It is my hope that we will be able to aim for an even higher position in the organization, after the events of today."

Giovanna rifles through his memories of this day. He doesn't remember what Fugo said well enough to know if he said something different the last time.

_There will be no higher position_, he thinks to himself, _not if we don't kill the Boss. He knows that, doesn't he? _

Bruno nods in acknowledgement, and then turns back up the stairs. "Let's go, Trish." The two of them begin to walk off, and Giovanna feels his heart jump into his throat. This could be the last time he sees Bruno, alive. The very moment Bruno walks into the church, he turns to Mista.

"Start a timer. One minute, and no more."

"I can do that," Giorno says. "After all, there's a clock on the laptop."

Narancia and Guido sit attentively next to Giorno, and Giorno has the laptop perched in his lap, finger tracing a point on the screen.

"Thank you." Giovanna turns back to the church. It is a long, excruciating minute. He counts the seconds, and wills his heart to slow down, hoping to prove mind over matter, once and for all. "Guido," he says after he thinks that roughly half a minute has gone by, "If I don't come out in ten—no, five minutes, come in after me."

The rest of the team perks up at Giovanna's words. "You got it. Send one of Sex Pistols out if you need me to come in sooner."

Giorno cuts in. "It's been a minute."

Giovanna steps off the boat.

* * *

The last time Giovanna had been in this church, he had been rushing down to the basement after Bruno had suddenly cut off contact. His heels make a clacking noise against the stone floor, and the rising sun casts everything in moving shadows, which walk along the walls as he rushes through the pews. Mindfulness has not slowed down his heart, and it palpitates weakly in his chest. He knows that he may run into the Boss before he even gets down the stairs. There will be no element of surprise either, what with his shoes being so loud, and he has a moment of mourning before he kicks them off and runs barefoot. Almost too quickly, he finds the stairs.

He stands at the top of them, very still. _I've done this before_, he thinks. Not this though, not this exact situation. This is just his memories, replaying in his head. This is just his thoughts, rattling around. This sense of _deja vu_? A product of his overactive imagination. He did not defeat the Boss in the basement of a church in Venice. He had been fifteen, and they had won on a terrible combination of chance and circumstance in Rome. If only he could convince himself that fate moved his hands. Requiem buzzes beneath his skin, vibrant and energetic. He did not have them the last time. Gold Experience, for all that he loves them, did not have the power of Requiem. Maybe this would be the defining change, the defining moment. The influence of Requiem. The key to his success. He takes the first step down, and then stops.

Waits. Listens. Puts his hand up to his mouth, to smother the sound of his breathing. When he's sure that there is nothing else down here with him, he continues. Each step takes ages, and he stops after every one of them. They begin to blur into the same step every time. He thinks that he's seen the same cracks in their stone faces ages before, and will keep seeing them ages into the very near future. Eventually, he reaches the bottom of the stairs.

He's clearly alone in this room. Throws a searching gaze into the darkness. Looks around. His heart slows to a jog, rather than a sprint, and he leans up against a column in front of him. Can't help but laugh, deep, for more than a few hysterical moments. Wipes the tears that accumulate in the corners of his eyes, and straightens himself out. He presses his blazer with his hands as best as he can. Requiem readies themself under his skin.

It's not enough.

"Giorno Giovanna," he hears from the shadows of the columns deep in the room. "It appears that the abundance of possibilities in history, and the whimsies of fate, have finally brought you to me."

He whips his head around to look further into the basement, but from behind him he can hear the echo of shoes on the steps. Because he can't see into the room, he turns around to find out who has followed him down. His heart spasms in his chest.

"He looks different from how you described him," says a man that is undeniably Diavolo. In his arms he carries Trish, and her stump of a forearm bleeds sluggishly onto the floor.

"No," he says with a horrified gasp. Footsteps approach him from deeper in the basement. He doesn't know if he should move towards the stairs, or step back. Should he move behind the columns? He finds himself off balance, and he's not even wearing his heels. A steadying hand finds its way to the column that he had just been resting against.

A terribly familiar voice responds to his gasp. "Oh, yes," they say from behind him with a deep sigh. "Let me repeat myself, Giorno Giovanna. _Yes_."

If he turns around, he will be able to put a face to that voice. But he _knows_ that voice. He doesn't need to turn around to know who it is. Something in his chest feels familiar. _Why has he seen this before?_

"I don't understand," Giovanna says instead, gripping the grooves in the column as if he'll find answers there in the stone.

"It was your mistake, not to kill me. So confident in your abilities, because of the Arrow."

He shuts his eyes in agony. "Shouldn't you be dying right now? Experiencing one of your infinite deaths?"

"Ah, but how fortunate for me, that one of my deaths came at the point of Black Sabbath's Arrow? Fated as I was to come out of even death stronger than I was before."

He opens his eyes. Diavolo has stopped on the stairs, staring down at him. That gaze is calculating, assessing. "You can take care of this, can't you?" Diavolo directs his words at the man behind Giovanna.

A chuckle. The footsteps have been getting steadily closer. "Answer me this," Giovanna says in a thin voice, "how did you avoid getting sent to another world, and to another death?"

"As a parting gift, I will show you the new power that has been bestowed upon me, Giorno Giovanna." That voice is a whisper in the room, but he hears it loudly all the same. He watches the other Diavolo in front of him reach the bottom of the stairs, Trish still in his hands. "Truly, this must be the hands of fate. _Oh_, how long I've thought of the end." The chuckle that Giovanna hears worries him more than any other sound that he's heard before. And then he keeps hearing it, over and over again. He's heard that sound before. But surely not in this same context. That strong sense of _deja vu_ flutters into his throat again.

"Haven't you already shown me the extent of your stand?" he asks, trying to figure out a way to move from the column, or to discreetly send one of Sex Pistols back to Mista. "This _deja vu_—I don't normally experience it so strongly."

"Hm," Giovanna feels the exhalation on his neck, and can't help the shiver. He watches the other Diavolo walk by them, not even glancing back. "Too smart for your own good. But it seems you've grasped the severity of your situation." He feels lips on his ear, and moves his head away. "I can hear your heart from here. Fear truly does come from the past."

Giovanna turns his face towards the voice. He sees what he knew he would see. Those bright green eyes, that purple lipstick, the long pink hair. Diavolo, the man who he had condemned to a fate worse than death. "How does it feel to have your stand be something that you fear?"

Diavolo smiles at him. "Fear only exists for one purpose: to be conquered."

"And how did you conquer Requiem's ability?"

"Death," Diavolo says while bringing a hand to grab Giovanna's chin, and the grip is bruising and tight, "takes time. Even if a death is _instantaneous_, there is the instantaneous instant _before_ death. That is the moment when Requiem's ability activates, and that is the moment that I have conquered. One cannot experience the truth of death, without first experiencing the moment before death, and if that moment never happens…" Diavolo's breath fans over Giovanna's face, and the stink of it makes him recoil, but Diavolo's fingers cut into his skin and keep him in place.

"Sticky Fingers!" Yells a man that can only be Bruno Buccellati. Giovanna sees a blue fist swing out from the shadow of a column. He uses the opportunity to duck out of Diavolo's grip, and he sees that fist make contact in the most satisfying of ways—with a crunch and a devastating crumple, Diavolo's skull collapses in on itself like wet tissue paper. It all happens in a matter of seconds. But perhaps that is enough. Perhaps—

Giovanna's nose crinkles at Diavolo's breath, finger nails dig into his cheek, green eyes stare down at him. Wasn't—how? Bruno yells, again. Sticky Fingers emerges from the shadows, again. But this time it is Diavolo who ducks, and the fist barely misses Giovanna's own skull. Diavolo's back is turned towards Giovanna, and he seizes the opportunity. He flings the two Sex Pistols out of his pocket and his shout is for both Bruno and the stand.

"This one can rewind time! The other Diavolo is getting away—" he dodges a leg to his face, Diavolo exhibiting some incredible dexterity in order to be able to try to kick Giovanna from behind while still looking at Bruno. Thankfully he does not hear Sex Pistols respond verbally, and he cannot imagine what would have happened had they spoken. He looks down off into the dark of the basement, where he sees Diavolo's back, and it is barely visible. Trish's arm has left a trail of blood on the floor.

But he can't leave Bruno to fight the other Diavolo. Had he not come here, to prevent…? He spares an anguished thought for Trish, _his_ Trish, and hopes that he can follow this one before it is too late.

Diavolo turns on him. Swings an arm wide. Giovanna uses Requiem to catch the punch. Energy surges through his hands and he will nullify these rewinds at the source, before they can even begin. Requiem's fists squeeze with an unbearable force and Diavolo's arm turns wooden under their grip.

It does not stick. They experience another rewind. He goes to dodge the kick, again. Clearly he was not fast enough. Maybe, if he grabs the leg—Diavolo hooks his knee, and slashes Giovanna's face with the heel of a vicious shoe. While Diavolo misses Giovanna's eyes, he does not miss Giovanna's nose. It crunches under the force of the swing and hot blood spurts onto Diavolo's shoe in a wild arc.

Bruno launches another of Sticky Fingers' arms at Diavolo, and a trail of unraveling zippers flutter in its wake. Requiem painfully snaps Giovanna's nose back into place in the distraction and keeps its arms out, ready to grab Diavolo when they can. His next attack—it needs to be incapacitating. It needs to be fatal. There's ringing in his ears and Requiem buzzes underneath his skin. Diavolo lets Sticky Fingers' arm get close and Bruno's aim is true, but the fist never lands. Sticky Fingers tries to call the arm back by re-zipping it to their body but Diavolo grabs those zippers and _tugs_. The pull jerks Bruno out into the open, away from his hiding space cut out of the side of a column. Diavolo goes to, to do _what_, Giovanna isn't sure. But it also doesn't matter.

A giant sequoia bursts from Diavolo's shoe, born of Giovanna's blood, and the weight of its enormous roots crack through the stone floor with a shuddering groan that causes dust to fall on them from the ceiling, and its trunk pushes them all out of its path with its incredible girth. And then they watch it un-grow, and Giovanna feels the crunch of his nose, again. A different approach then. It needs to last longer. It needs to be noticed later. But how long? He hasn't yet figured out the timing. The ringing grows louder, deep in his ears. He makes up his mind.

And watches Diavolo shake his leg, trying to kick his shoe off. In his distraction, Sticky Fingers' fist, whose aim had been true the first time, remains true. It crunches into the side of Diavolo's face, and forces Diavolo to stagger back, shoe still on. Requiem reaches out. They grasp onto Diavolo shoulders, and Giovanna can feel bones creak under their grip. There is the familiar surge of energy, a bright light rushing through his body, and then—

_Melting_. It _burns_. It burns through him, that rush of Requiem's energy, and it leaves him scorched. He watches their arms disintegrate before his very eyes, dripping to the floor like molten gold. Diavolo turns his crushed cheek back to look at Giovanna, and his lips are twisted up in a painful smile of smeared lipstick and blood.

"He has a second ability!" Giovanna yells to Bruno over Diavolo's shoulder, horrified and empty at the loss of Requiem, but the ringing in his ears prevents him from knowing if what he said was intelligible. Bruno stops in his approach, one foot off the floor. But this does not stop Diavolo. He turns, now free of Requiem's grip, which is non-existent due to somehow melting out of Giovanna's skin, and his eyes widen as his right leg does not move.

"Very cute, Giorno Giovanna." Diavolo brings a hand to curl around Giovanna's neck, squeezing tightly and lifting his head in the process. "What disgusting parasite did you put into my leg?"

"_Ixodes holocyclus_. The Australian paralysis tick. I imagine their feeding has injected their neurotoxin into your blood, and very soon you'll find more than just your leg paralyzed."

"Buccellati! Giovanna!" They all hear echo down the stairs. _Giorno_. Alarm coils in Giovanna's bones.

"It seems that our time together has come to an end," Diavolo says. An indistinct, shadowy arm materializes at his side. "Or rather, it is _your_ time that has come to an end." That arm slices down, and Giovanna cannot move out of its path. His eyes lock with Bruno's, which are bright and wide, even from across the room.

The _tearing_. The _ripping_. _Cutting_ through his shoulder—_down_—_down_—

* * *

Mista had not moved from his spot, standing on the steps, since Giovanna had left. That had been three long minutes ago. Giorno splits his attention between the laptop, following the moving dot on the screen, and the cats walking across the pier. He makes soft kissing noises at one particularly fat calico, but the cat remains impassive in the face of his affections, blinking its yellow eyes in his direction before returning to its paw. The other cat, a friendly grey tabby, taunts him with its tail, which is high and proud and _clearly_ inviting, but refuses to walk over to him on the boat. It instead walks in coy circles, turning around to look at him with baleful eyes. It is on one of these turns, that Giorno notices the tabby is somehow returning to the exact spot it was standing in before, and is somehow retracing its steps perfectly. _Every_ time. Giorno looks at the laptop, but the brooch is still going up the elevator, presumably with Bruno.

"Mista," Giorno says, still looking at the cat. He hears the older Mista make a noise of acknowledgement, and can feel a shift of weight in the boat as presumably the younger turns to him, "are the Boss' abilities related to time?"

Mista does not respond, and Giorno looks at the older man, finding himself the subject of intense scrutiny. "Yes," Mista says after a long pause. He frowns. "How did you know?"

Giorno points to the cats. "They keep doing the same thing, over and over again. And if the Boss can affect time…"

Mista's frown deepens. "Diavolo can _skip_ time. He never once went _back_ in time."

"Is there anyone that can reverse it?" Giorno asks, and then turns his attention back to the laptop. He lets out a noise of surprise before he can contain it, and he can see the others turn to him in his peripheral vision. The brooch has gone… downstairs. Rather quickly for something that had almost reached the top of the bell tower.

"They're in the basement, aren't they?" Mista asks, and Giorno understands in that moment that while he had been surprised by Bruno asking for one of his brooches, Mista and Giovanna must have been expecting it. He shudders to think that his own actions are some sort of—a play, that they're doomed to act out, or—fate, guiding them while they all _think_ they have choice, or—he stops himself before he can get ahead of himself.

"_Something_ is in the basement, yes." Giorno says, and then gets up, looking at Mista expectantly. "What's going to happen?"

"By now the Boss has already taken Trish. But we can get a jump on him, if we're smart about it." Mista looks at the entrance to the church, and then looks back at Giorno. "Do you see any way into that basement that's not through the front door?"

Giorno inspects the map for a few tense seconds. "It appears to let out into the maze behind the church."

Mista squints and his gaze catches on something that Giorno can't see. "If I remember correctly… the hedges aren't very tall. Can't exactly ambush the guy when the bushes don't even come up to your waist." Those dark eyes focus on him, and then Mista smirks. "Think you could grow an entire labyrinth," Mista snaps his fingers, "like that?"

Giorno finds himself answering Mista's smirk. "I can certainly try."

"No trying about it. You _can_. You _will_." Whether it be overconfidence or genuine knowledge, Giorno can't help but feel emboldened by Mista's faith in his abilities. Or, rather, in the other Giorno's abilities, as the case may be.

"Uh, guys?" Narancia says while still searching the area with Aerosmith, "aren't we kind of jumping the gun? We still haven't heard anything from Buccellati or Giovanna. _And_ it hasn't been five minutes yet."

Mista, who already has his revolver out, makes his way to the top of the stairs. "The last time the Boss escaped. It'll make our lives that much easier if we can take him out now."

Giorno feels the boat dip worryingly with the shift of someone's weight. He hears Abbacchio's grunt of annoyance before he sees Abbacchio get up. "All right. For some damn reason Buccellati believes you, but I want it known that I'm not happy about working with you."

"Heard loud and clear," Mista says. Abbacchio steps off the boat and Giorno quickly follows, placing the laptop sufficiently far from the water. He gets a quick smile from Mista before the man turns to the rest of the group. "What about you guys?"

"Count me in," Guido says while thumbing his nose, "can't let my older self do all the cool stuff."

Narancia watches Guido step off the boat, and then turns to Fugo. Fugo has not looked up once. Instead he speaks while looking out over the water, keeping his head down. "If you were Buccellati…" he trials off, and Narancia nudges his shoulder.

"Fugo, what should we do?"

Fugo shakes his head. "I've made my decision. I'll only follow Buccellati. And some guy pretending to be Mista from the future is _not_ my choice."

Giorno looks at Mista, hoping to see if he can glean something about the man's opinions about all this. Had Fugo done this before? Had Narancia hesitated before? Had Abbacchio stepped off the boat first before? He doesn't know. He almost doesn't want to know either. If time had not changed Bruno's choice… If time had not changed his own choice… What would?

"Panna," Mista says, body turned back to the boat, "you're one of the most loyal people I know, but you also live with a lot of guilt. I'm not saying you have to follow _me_, but you should think about this. Before you do something that you regret."

Fugo's face contorts into an angry frown. "Who are you? Who the fuck are you to even pretend that you know who I am and what I'm living with, you—"

Mista cuts off Fugo's rant before he can really get into the meat of it, and Giorno can see Fugo's chest shake with the force of his breathing, uneven and harsh. "The person that I know made a choice that he regrets to this day. He won't even talk to us about what he did in between the time he left and then came back, and that lasted _years_. All I'm asking you to do, _Fugo_, is to _think_. And I know that's something you can do." Mista waves a hand. "Those of you that are coming with me, lets go." He walks off before waiting to see just who will follow him, but Giorno feels the press of time on his heels and spares a quick glance at Narancia and Fugo before rushing to follow.

Abbacchio overtakes Mista with long strides, and turns around to walk backwards while still looking at Mista. "What's the plan, hotshot?" Regardless of what Mista thinks of Abbacchio's attitude he seems to nonetheless take it in stride, not even a hint of a frown on his face.

"The Boss has two main abilities: being able to see into the future, and skipping forward in time. And he's really jacked." Giorno doesn't even know where to begin with the knowledge that Mista has just bestowed upon them all, with both bits delivered as if they were equally important. _Skipping time?_ _Was this what Giovanna meant, when he mentioned that they had met stand users with powers over time? Are there more of them?_ Giorno shudders at the thought. And finds that he has company in this line of thinking.

Where Mista had let Abbacchio's words roll off him like water off a duck's back, it seems that Abbacchio does not have a similar gift for maintaining his composure. His purple lips drop open with a wordless gasp, mouth so wide that Giorno gets an eyeful of an unfortunate lipstick stain on Abbacchio's front teeth. "The Boss can do _what_?"

"Don't act like that," Mista says with a careless shrug of his shoulders, "I know that you heard me."

"How long are we talking about?" The younger Guido says while pulling his own revolver out from the front of his pants.

"Ten seconds. Which doesn't sound like a lot, but trust—"

"Mista!" Two of Sex Pistols yell, and they fly towards the group of them from where they presumably came out of the church. They barrel into Mista with little warning besides their screeching, but that is warning enough, especially with the volume generated by their tiny bodies. "There are two bosses!"

"One—has Trish!"

"—attacked Giorno—"

"Enough!" Mista swipes a hand through the air but his stands deftly avoids being grabbed. "One at a time. What happened?"

No. 1 and No. 7 look at each other before No. 1, ever the leader and most bossy of all of them, speaks. "There are _two_ Diavolos," they say while showing Mista the requisite number of fingers to get the point across. "And one of them attacked Giorno, and the other one is running off with Trish!"

No. 7 pipes up. "He's heading through the basement right now!"

"Right," Mista brings a hand up to help him stretch his neck, and it cracks with a loud pop. "Plan. Okay. Giorno, I'm going to need you to plants some seeds by the exit to the maze. Make it so they take a while to grow, and that they're something like vines. Diavolo's probably not going to want to be seen leaving the church, so we can expect him to skip time as he gets closer to the exit."

"I can use Moody Blues," cuts in Abbacchio, "if he sees that there's a gardner or someone outside, he might try to get out unseen. Assuming he doesn't just decide to attack a civilian."

"You wanted me to grow the hedges, didn't you?" Giorno asks, remembering the earlier remark about Gold Experience's abilities with something like hot anticipation at the chance to change the landscape of an entire area as he sees fit. "I can start with the ones by the exit, and focus on just the wall facing the church."

"Good idea, Giorno," Mista says while picking up the pace of his jog and pulling a seemingly ridiculous number of bullets from his pockets. They must be very deep indeed, to hide that many. "Me and Guido are going to need you to imbue our bullets. Plants, animals, creepy crawlies, doesn't matter. Our goal right now is to recover Trish."

Giorno quickly finds himself drowning in bullets, passing them off to Gold Experience while holding the rest in his jacket, which he's picked up the bottom to make some sort of impromptu fabric bag. Where Mista had not specified into what to change the bullets, Giorno lets his mind go over all the zoology books that he's poured over instead of doing his school work. Snakes, spiders, frogs, lizards. He tries to reign his focus onto the idea of eggs, and maybe seeds, or anything that would start small and then grow in the time lost to the Boss' abilities. Where Mista had implied distraction, Giorno's mind goes to lethal. His mind goes to Polpo, but he knows that trick will not work here. He imbues every bullet with a different life, and hopes that one of them will do the trick. Mista and Guido take the bullets back without even asking what he has changed them into, and he's silently grateful about not having to explain why he chose incapacitating over inconvenience.

They get to the back of the church in short order, and Giorno sees the maze. The hedges are indeed too short to hide any of them, and especially not someone of Abbacchio's height. He sees the exit from the back of the church, and the entrance to the maze. The two are connected loosely by a path, and he rushes to this space to see what he has to work with. The pebble path becomes a seed path, and when he can't decide between plants with vines, or trees with a tendency to produce surface roots, he compromises by using both. He will not allow Mista's faith in his—or Giovanna's—abilities to be misplaced. He will not allow the Boss to escape with Trish. He turns his attention to the maze.

Stops, when he sees the priest walking towards them. He starts to call the others but then doesn't, confused when the priest passes by them. Giorno sees Abbacchio a little ways from him, and then realizes that instead of a gardner Moody Blues must have found a member of the clergy to impersonate.

"That's odd," he hears Abbacchio say, and Mista looks up from where he and Guido have convened to discuss the best way to catch Diavolo off guard with Sex Pistols.

"What's odd?" Mista asks, frown deepening.

"This priest," Abbacchio gestures to Moody Blues with a wave, "is wearing nun's clothing."

Guido's head shoots up. "What do you mean they're wearing nun's clothing?" Giorno looks at the priest, but evidently doesn't see what Abbacchio sees.

"Sure, the cassock and the saturno hat are fine, but the whole head covering? Definitely a nun's."

"The… what?" Mista squints at the priest circles between the church and the maze, lost in thought, treading the same path over and over again.

"You know," Abbacchio says with a careless shrug, "the coif, wimple, and guimpe. The white stuff covering their head and neck, going down onto their chest. You can't even tell what denomination they are. It's a bit weird, is all I'm saying."

"Abbacchio," Mista says with a strange tone, "why exactly do you know this?"

"Some of us actually completed our secondary education, you dumbass."

"I'm pretty sure you're the only one here that paid attention to those classes." Mista says while pointing a finger and squinting suspiciously, "_and_ the only people that paid that much attention were the ones that wanted to bang the sisters."

Abbacchio snorts. "Or the fathers."

"The _fathers_—are you serious?" Mista shakes a hand, palm open, at Abbacchio, evidently overwhelmed by this knowledge.

"Hey," Abbacchio says defensively, and Giorno is taken aback by that curl of a smile on Abbacchio's face, "what respectable Catholic boy _didn't_ have a crush on the new, young priest?"

"Some of us don't like living in sin, Abbacchio!" Mista has gone full body with his disbelief, waving not one, but both hands at Abbacchio, revolver waving to and fro. This is, bizarrely enough, the… happiest Giorno has ever seen Abbacchio. He's not sure if Abbacchio is… taking the piss, as it were, at Mista's expense, and he decides to dutifully get back to the hedges.

From where Giorno has knelt down to tend to the plants' roots, he hears Abbacchio speak. "That's rich, coming from a man who works for the mafia." His words lack the usual bite that he tends to direct Giorno's way.

Giorno puts too much energy into the roots. He had been imagining arborvitae trees, and their tall pyramid shapes and thick branches with scale-like leaves, and evidently the plants had reacted too enthusiastically to Gold Experience's ministrations. They shoot above him and quickly keep growing, towering at twenty-something meters, at the very least. Whatever the rest of the group had been going to say is abruptly cut off as they watch the trees stand proud and lush, bright green against the pale blue morning sky. Giorno has to walk out of the maze to see the group, because the foliage is so thick that he can't move the branches, and stands there in hesitant embarrassment as the other three look between him and the trees.

"The Boss won't be able to see us," Giorno says, deciding to closely inspect a leaf by his face. He quickly finds himself distracted when he sees the pink-salmon color of the young cones, which is striking against the rest of branches.

"Good work, Giorno," Mista pats Giorno's shoulder as he walks by, and the other two also enter the maze. The four of them split up on either side of the entrance, Guido and Giorno on one, Abbacchio and Mista on the other. "When you can," Mista directs his next words at Abbacchio, "withdraw Moody Blues—"

The oddest sensation overcomes Giorno's body. He feels like he has been unmoored, and he finds himself somewhere that he doesn't understand. When he comes back to his body, it feels like there is something trembling in his limbs, but when he looks around himself he finds that the others are still where they were, not even seconds ago. He goes to ask them if they too experienced this bizarre sensation, but a sound interrupts him. The sound of feet, walking across rocks. It is not the rhythmic back and forth of Moody Blues disguised as the priest. It's someone else. Giorno moves his hand, ever so slowly, to cover his mouth. He sees Mista and Abbacchio across from him, and Mista is tensed, coiled to attack.

"The priest is a nice touch," says a deep voice, almost too soft to hear through the hedges, "but you must think me daft to expect me not to notice the trees." Abbacchio goes down with a spurt of blood erupting from his left shoulder, and Giorno watches in horror as the older man crumples to the floor.

"Heal him!" Mista yells while flinging himself into the entrance of the maze, and the sound of his revolver from that close is deafening in Giorno's ears.

Several things happen all at once, too quickly for Giorno to keep track of. Roots burst from the earth, scattering debris and rocks in their wake, and soon after vines blanket everything that Giorno can see with their writhing leaves. Somehow he has already made it to Abbacchio's side, and he doesn't remember running over. It throws him off balance for a precious second, before he rips the branches off the nearest tree, with which he stoppers Abbacchio's wounds. Both the Guido Mistas have left the maze to shoot at the Boss, and Giorno does not know when they all skipped time, but he can feel the disorienting effects after every jump. But he needs a way to be able to tell for sure. What would—

There's an anguished grunt, and a loud curse. Guido is snickering, and Giorno can hear that sound over the slithering of all the critters on the ground. A Black Mamba curls around his leg, and while it looks at him with soft eyes and flicks its tongue out, he suddenly realizes—while his creations will not attack _him_… This thought floods his veins with icy horror, paralyzing him in his spot. He only startles when Abbacchio groans under his hands, and those bizarre purple ombre eyes snap open.

"Stay down," Giorno says with a firm press, and Abbacchio's frown is deep, his eyes disbelieving. It happens again. But this time the hedges right above Giorno's head are missing, somehow chopped down in a clean swipe. The tree tops are thrown a little ways off in front of them, and there are leaves all over Giorno's shoulder, and stuck to Abbacchio's front and face. Giorno pops his head up.

There is a man, swiping at the various vines and trees that have grown, and there are the two Guido Mistas, also tangled in those same plants. When Giorno looks up further still, he sees Trish caught at the tops of his trees, and far away from the rest of them, safely out of reach, but he spares a thought for how difficult it will be to get her down. It looks as though both Mistas had been trying to reload their guns, but the bullets had done their work. There is a Gila monster hanging from one of the vines near the Boss, and it snaps at his head, catching his pink hair. The Komodo dragon on the floor goes to take a bite from the man's legs. And then, he kicks.

It is, perhaps, fortunate for the Boss, that he does not kill the monitor lizard. Giorno would have mourned its death, but perhaps from its passing it would have ascended to even greater heights than its brief, borrowed life. But the Boss does not kill the lizard, and thus he is _only_ thrust backwards by the reflected force of his kick. It shoots him through the tree that had grown around him, and flings him off away from the group of them. And most importantly, it tosses him away from Trish. The hedges, with their impromptu trimming, are now shorter than they were before, and Giorno hops over them. Abbacchio does the same, but seems to stumble on the other side.

There are any number of things that could have happened next. Mista could have broken free of the trees and vines, and reloaded his revolver. Guido could have done the same, or maybe he could have had difficulty wrestling himself free, and Giorno would have gone to help. Giorno could have reverted the animals, so as to ensure that they would not attack the group. Maybe Abbacchio could have gone to get Trish, or hung back to avoid getting a matching cut down his other shoulder. What happens instead, is another volley of gunshots. Or, more specifically, they hear the _bratatat_ of Aerosmith's guns, and they see that toy plane fly into view, on the opposite side of the church that they had all run around, but also on the side closest to the Boss.

Those bullets cut through the trees, and are too effective in scattering the spray. What had been holding Trish up suddenly snaps from the combined weight of her body and the tree tops themselves, and Narancia finally skids around the corner, and sees just who he has been shooting at. He doesn't even have enough time to react in a Narancia way, with loud yelling and waving arms. That time is taken from him.

"Know this!" The Boss yells at them, his stand tall and proud in front of him, turned towards Narancia, "you leave with your lives only because of chance!"

Giorno feels the sensation of free falling, feels the turn in his guts and the whoop of his stomach, and when he looks up, he sees Narancia flying back. Flying towards the lagoon, his body moving so quickly that it's an indistinct, blurry shape.

They all make inarticulate, involuntary noises of surprise and shock. Mista, who had been looking up to catch Trish, finds himself falling to the floor after having failed to grab her in the timeskip, her own crash softened by his body. Abbacchio, oddly enough, is the first to move despite his injuries. And move he does. He sprints towards the water and Giorno rushes to follow him, Guido following on their heels. Abbacchio doesn't even stop as he gets to the lagoon's edge—he dives in, straight after Narancia. Blood has spilled onto the surface of the water, and it is a dark, painful red. Gold Experience is out of Giorno's skin with a not even the barest surface of a thought, and his concentration is shot when Guido fires his revolver.

Giorno looks up, but the Boss is already gone. When he looks back down, Abbacchio has not resurfaced. The sound of footsteps behind them startles Giorno badly enough that he somehow loses his balance on flat land, but Gold Experience is already there to prop him up. They bring their face up to his, and he feels their concern, but ignores them in favor of looking at who has just run up behind them. They don't have the time to—

It's Mista, rushing towards them with Trish in his arms. She is still out cold, and she is still missing her arm. Mista is also holding several tree branches, which he thrusts out at Giorno as soon as he gets close enough. Giorno doesn't need to be told twice, or, rather, he doesn't even need to be told the once. Gold Experience responds to his thoughts, and together they make a replacement hand for Trish, and keep their attention of the lagoon.

Abbacchio is down there long enough for Guido to get antsy. Just when it looks like Guido is going to jump into the water, two heads pop up. Abbacchio, with his long hair plastered to his face, and Narancia, whose face has gone slack with his unconsciousness. Guido is helping Abbacchio up before he can even ask for the help, and Mista shuffles Trish into Giorno's and Gold Experience's combined arms to get Narancia out of the water. Giorno has never healed two people at once before, and he is also feeling the strain of exertion from the fight. Behind them he knows that there are creatures that he will need to revert, but for now he chooses his priorities based on Narancia's wounds. A deep hole has made its home in Narancia's stomach, but thankfully Giorno feels a pulse when he starts shoving branches into the space of missing flesh.

This process could take seconds, it could take minutes. Regardless of how long it actually takes Giorno to recreate both Trish's arm and Narancia's stomach, he starts to feel woozy, and sweat drips down his forehead.

"We should get back to the boats," Mista says, taking Trish back when it seems that her arm has taken to the new appendage. Whether Abbacchio grunts in agreement, or because he is picking up Narancia, Giorno doesn't know, but grunt all the same he does. Giorno looks over to the maze, which now has trees and vines surrounding the back entrance, snakes and lizards running around, and lopsided hedges, and he knows that he needs to change them all back, lest someone get hurt—

Hurt.

"Where's Fugo?" Giorno asks, and when he looks to Mista's face, he sees placid acceptance. "Did Fugo not join you before?" Mista shakes his head. They reach the pier, and they see neither Fugo, nor the other boat. There is only the one that Mista and Giovanna brought. "And did he take the boat last time as well?"

Mista's eyes take on a strange glint. "No." He shakes his head. "Last time we left him here."

"But that means he left _after_ the fight, last time." Giorno is not sure quite what he's missing here, and can find no answers in Mista's face.

"Maybe I just really pissed him off—I don't know. We'll have to ask Narancia when he wakes up."

"And Buccellati?" Giorno can feel Guido and Abbacchio perk up at the mention of Bruno.

"What about him?" Mista asks while walking down the steps to the singular boat, Trish still in his arms. His eyes are focused on the empty space of water where the other boat used to be.

"Why hasn't he come back yet?"

Mista looks up. Ignores Giorno's question and turns his eyes to his younger self. "Which way to Diavolo go?"

"He pretty much ran down the path that we just took. Why?"

"Giorno. Guido." Mista says while looking out along the pier and the steps in front of the church, "I want you both to go look for Buccellati and Giovanna. Abbacchio, you stay here with me. Keep your guard up." Mista has both his revolver and Sex Pistols out, and Guido mirrors him.

Without so much as a by your leave, Giorno and Guido make their way into the church. Giorno is still feeling the effects of overstretching Gold Experience, and makes his way a touch slower than Guido's. They find a pair of white Louboutin pretty much in the entrance of the church, and exchange a look.

"There's a few side rooms, besides the upper and lower levels." Giorno tells Guido as they make their way further inside.

"I can take the rooms and the upper levels." Guido says, Sex Pistols fanning out in front on him, "less walking for you if you only have to check one room, right?"

Giorno feels a faint flush of embarrassment at being so obvious in his exhaustion, but Guido has taken off before he can protest and defend his youthful, untiring vigor. So much for appearing poised and composed, he supposes.

With Guido no longer by his side, he notices the quiet of the church. His shoes are loud against the stone, and he can hear Guido moving around with Sex Pistols, who have taken up their usual chatter of yelling at both each other and their user. He calls out Bruno's and Giovanna's names, but gets no answer.

What he gets instead, is a very odd sense of vertigo. The hallway to the stairs leading down is much longer than he remembers thinking it was from the map, but maybe he simply misjudged the distance. He's not sure. Maybe the overuse of Gold Experience has affected him more than he thought? Eventually, he sees the stairs, and feels the bubble of something in his skin. An odd sensation, of having already walked down those stairs, even though he knows he only knows of them because of a map.

"Buccellati!" Giorno calls again, rushing as fast as he can down the stairs. His shoes click against the stone, and he hears that sound repeated in his head more times than he thinks he takes steps. "Giovanna!"

"Down here, Giorno!" Bruno yells back, and Giorno feels an answering swell in his chest. He takes two stairs at a time, almost tripping over his own feet in his haste. He gets to the bottom, and sees Bruno hunched over something. Someone. Blood is pooled on the floor. Bruno's suit is stained with it. So is Giovanna's blazer.

Bruno looks up from where he's carefully zipping the gash that runs the length of Giovanna's left shoulder and down into his neck. "Good. Come help me." Giorno knows a command when he hears one. He moves faster, and slams to his knees when he gets to Giovanna's side. He pushes Bruno's hands out of the way and presses his own into the zippers that have been left behind. Gold Experience rebuilds flesh at his fingertips. Arteries, capillaries, veins, muscles. All of them formed anew by his hands.

He feels the warmth of blood beneath his palms. The warmth of Giovanna's blood. His fingers slip through it, catch on the rips through Giovanna's blazer. He presses down harder. Gold Experience shimmers through his skin.

"Come on," he says, and his hands shake with the energy flowing through them, and Gold Experience blurs his vision. He goes to wipe the sweat that's beaded on his brow, but stops when he sees his hands. They're covered with blood. They shake more, and it's not because of Gold Experience's powers.

Hands grab his. His vision tunnels in on them. The red under those fingernails, the stains on the cuffs. The hands squeeze his. "Giorno," says a disembodied voice, "you've done everything you can. He just needs to wake himself up." Giorno looks up. Sees Bruno's face. His dark hair. His blue eyes. He looks relatively untouched.

Bruno tugs at Giorno's hands. Brings them to rest on Giovanna's chest. "Feel." Bruno tells him. "Can't you feel his heart?" The only heart that Giorno can feel is the one in his chest, and he is hyper aware of how wildly it beats.

_Is this what I'll look like?_ he thinks to himself. He swallows past the lump in his throat. Holds his breath. Tries to feel. Under the shaking of his hand, he feels movement. It shocks him so much that he jerks his head down, down towards Giovanna's chest, but then he pulls away. His braid swings over his shoulder and swipes through the mess. He instead turns his head to look down Giovanna's body, and brings his ear to Giovanna's mouth, and feels a breath on his skin.

Giorno's existence narrows to the details. The way Giovanna's breathing feels against his cheek, the way it rattles in Giovanna's lungs, stuck there, painful, in perpetuity. The force of Giorno's relief makes him almost sick with it, and it causes him to press his hands deeper into Giovanna's skin. Bruno's hands press down with his, and together they draw a groan from Giovanna's chest. They both hear Giovanna call out to Requiem, and something underneath Giorno's hands bubbles in response. He's not quick enough in pulling his hands away, not with Bruno's on top of his, and he feels a burning rush of energy. It licks at him and travels up his arms, jumping to Bruno and leaving them golden in its wake.

They see it drip from under Giovanna's eyes, and they see it seep out of his pores, thick and molten, onto the floor and into his blood. They don't mix. Giorno has to move his face away from Giovanna, and then both he and Bruno have to move even further as Requiem's arms grow from out of the floor. Requiem's eyes pop out of some ether, pupils wide and constantly moving, just like the first time Giorno saw them, and those parts coalesce into a half-formed stand before they sink back down with an audible sigh. Giovanna opens his eyes, and Requiem's arrow sits proud on his forehead for a few moments before disappearing. They see Giovanna's mouth move, but hear no words, and Giorno imagines that just as Requiem spoke to him, Requiem must be speaking to Giovanna.

Giovanna's brows twitch, and then a riot of motion spasms through his face. His eyes flutter open and closed, and his pupils are black saucers, eating the irises of his eyes. They contract quickly against the light in the basement, and Giorno watches those pupils bounce between his and Bruno's face.

Before either of them can speak, Giovanna is struggling to sit up, and Giorno hesitates for a moment before he brings his hands to support Giovanna's back. He doesn't want to think about the stains that he's leaving on the blazer. "Diavolo…?" Giovanna says while twisting his body to look into the room, and Giorno can hear Giovanna's soft grunts of pain.

"You should know better than to move so soon, especially after an injury like that," Bruno says, light scolding coloring his tone. He's brought his own hands to his sides, still kneeling on the floor by Giovanna.

"What happened to Diavolo? Are you both alright?" Giovanna says once he's confirmed that it appears no one else is in the basement with them. Giorno shakes his head when Giovanna looks at him, and Giovanna turns his gaze to Bruno.

"After he… attacked you, he fled. I chose to close your wound rather than make chase."

Giovanna nods. "Thank you. I am indebted to you more than you could know."

"I would have done the same for young Giorno here," Bruno says with a small gesture of his hand.

"And he, you." Giovanna says. Giorno startles, but can't say that he would disagree with Giovanna's statement. Perhaps he would disagree with being spoken for, but this is… himself, after all. He shudders to think at what Giovanna has seen, and imagines that there must have been situations where Giovanna made this very same choice.

Bruno looks between the both of them, and an awkward smile makes its place known on his lips. He tucks his hair behind his ears but then freezes, looking at his fingers, evidently having forgotten that they are still covered in Giovanna's blood. "Well," he says.

"That looks like some kind of eye black," Giovanna says while pointing to the area under his own eyes. But then Giovanna gasps, and struggles to stand up. "Trish!" he says while wobbling on his own feet. Giorno gets up and steadies Giovanna, and to his side, Bruno does the same.

"She's alright!" Giorno says, "Mista got your message, and we were able to find the Boss because Bruno had dropped my brooch on him. We went to fight him, and he ended up fleeing as well, leaving her behind."

Giovanna turns his gaze back to Bruno, assessing. "And Diavolo did not attack you?" Bruno shakes his head.

"I'm fine. But you," Bruno pauses. "What exactly did he do, when you said that he had a second ability?"

Giorno feels Requiem flicker into existence more than he sees them, but they must not have the energy to fully form outside of Giovanna's body, because all he sees of the stand is their hands peeling away from Giovanna's, and their crown growing from Giovanna's temple. "I think," Giovanna says with a shake of his head, "that Diavolo can reverse more than just time. But I'm not sure."

Giorno feels hands grasping at his sides, and sees that Requiem is pawing at his jacket, fingers weak but insistent. He needs only one arm wrapped around Giovanna's waist, and upon having that thought he removes his other arm to grasp one of Requiem's hands, and their fingers curl into his. Quite literally, almost, and Giorno has the sensation of something sinking into his flesh, but there is no pain associated with the action. Gold Experience responds to the intrusion with barely suppressed curiosity, right beneath his thoughts.

"Okay," Giovanna says, distracting Giorno from the interactions between Gold Experience and Requiem happening just beneath his skin, "let me go. I'm good to stand on my own."

It is this moment, when Giorno moves away from Giovanna's side, that he notices that although Bruno had zipped Giovanna's skin closed, Bruno had not zipped Giovanna's clothes. Giovanna's blazer sags down his arm from where he had been cut, and the top of his jumpsuit, which had been thin on fabric to begin with, completely flops over. All three of them look down at the same time, following the movement of that bloody piece of once-white silk. Giorno's eyes distressingly get stuck on the shining piece of jewelry on Giovanna's left breast, which suspiciously looks like—_yes_, when he turns to look at Bruno, he sees the matching zippers of Giovanna's piercing on Bruno's suit.

"Interesting accessory," Bruno says dryly, and with more composure than Giorno could even imagine mustering in this situation.

Giovanna shrugs a shoulder, and to Giorno's quickly-growing mortified horror, the motion causes the piercing to swing back and forth in its place. "Usually I'm a bit more deliberate about who I flash." Bruno snorts. Honest to god _snorts_, and the sound of it startles both Giorno and Giovanna, but Giovanna's surprise is still the more evident of the two because his shirt is _still_ hanging off of him, and his chest _moves_—

_The only way for this to be worse_, Giorno thinks in numb embarrassment, _is if I was the one with the torn shirt_.

And then Giorno thinks about his jacket, and the heart cut-out in the chest, and the fact that he did not bring any undershirts at all, and that if they get into more fights, and if the jacket comes off, and, and, _and_. _How_ does Giovanna even go around, wearing what he does? Giorno thinks that he would die the minute he even thought about wearing shirts that were little more than scraps of fabric, but here Giovanna stands, somehow not immediately laid low by this entire situation.

Bruno, unaware of Giorno's thoughts but clearly distracted by thoughts of his own, brings a hand to his own chest, and then touches the zipper hanging off his right breast. "Do you…" A pause. Long enough that it causes Giorno to stop staring at the piercing to stare at Bruno, who is pulling at his own zipper ineffectually. "Would you like." Bruno says, an incomplete statement, but apparently the statement that Bruno wants to make. Eventually he tugs at the zipper a bit firmer, and it comes free. "A matching pair?" This is how Giorno dies. He knows this with absolute clarity.

"_Yes_, I mean, only if you're willing." Giovanna says, and Giorno feels a wave of embarrassment at how genuine the other man sounds.

Bruno hands the zipper over with little fanfare, but then his hand stays stretched out. "I should probably zip your shirt and jacket back together. May I?" Giovanna nods, and Bruno does just that. He makes quick work of it too, and the only signs of the clothing's previous state are the stains.

Giorno thoughts are still a scrambled mess of questions, and it seems the sight of himself a decade into the future loosens his tongue. He deeply regrets his words as he says them. "Why are your breasts so much smaller than mine?" Giorno bites his lip, and hopes in vain desperation to be struck down where he stands. Had his hands not been covered in blood, he would have already hidden them in his pants' pockets.

"I imagine," Giovanna says slowly, chewing something over, "that the testosterone I'm taking would have something to do with that. It's changed my body fat distribution, but it's happened so gradually over the years…" Giorno nods his head. _So_, he thinks to himself, _something to look forward to_.

"Did you…" Giorno trails off, worried at sounding too desperate in front of these two, despite the fact that logically, intellectually, he knows that neither of them would judge him. Especially not himself from the future, who had defied what the adults in his life had told him would be _just a phase_. And especially not Bruno, the man who—who—_genuinely_, _honestly_ cared for his ideas and opinions. Bruno, who found him… Inspiring. Giovanna looks at him expectantly. "When did you stop," Giorno gestures to his own chest in a roundabout way, making a horizontal circle in front of his body.

Evidently, Giovanna must understand Giorno's intent, because he asks, "Taping?" Giorno nods. "It took me," a pause, "years to finally come out. And after that," Giovanna waves a hand, "I figured that I could just… stop." _Years_, Giorno thinks to himself. _Years_.

"Excuse me," Bruno cuts in, concern lacing his voice, "_taping_? What, with the elastic bandages?"

Giorno shakes his head. "No, like athletic tape. Wait, you know about…?"

"Oh, _Giorno_," Bruno says, hand reaching out to touch Giorno's shoulder but stopping, probably because he has remembered that he has blood on said hand. "You should have said something—I have binders at my house." Giorno blinks at Bruno, uncomprehending.

"You have," his brain jitters to a halt. Bruno is…? _Bruno is…?_ "Binders? At your house?"

Bruno nods, unaware of the life changing revelations happening in Giorno's mind, at this very second. "I stopped using them when I was around your age, but they should be more than serviceable before we get you your own."

"I had always wondered," Giovanna cuts in, as calm as can be, somehow not as affected by these revelations as Giorno is, "why you had kept those in your office, and not your bedroom."

Both Giorno and Bruno take a moment to process this information. Bruno, with casual and understated surprise, and Giorno, with complete and all-encompassing shock. His futureself has been in Bruno's house? Bruno's office? Bruno's _bedroom_?

Bruno seems to come to his own conclusions must faster than Giorno comes to his. "Since I was no longer wearing them, I kept them in the office. That way I would remember them, and which ones I still had, and if someone needed them, I could give them away." This seems to satisfy Giovanna, and he begins to hobble along on his unsteady feet towards the stairs.

"Wait," Giorno puts out both arms, "wait, wait, _wait_." Bruno and Giovanna both look at him, and Giorno grabs Bruno's outstretched hand with both of his. "_You're_—_you're_—" his voice cracks, and he feels the flush of embarrassment, his voice is _always_ cracking around Bruno—

"Giorno," Bruno smiles at him, softly, kindly. "Am I the first trans person you've met? Besides yourself?"

Giovanna walks back into Giorno's space, and grips his shoulders. "I had forgotten what it was like, at your age." Giorno feels Giovanna put his face into the crown of his hair, and Giovanna rubs a hand down his back. "It's alright you know, and there are plenty of people out there, just like you. Just like us." Giovanna's words are muffled by Giorno's hair, but he hears them all the same. And he feels them, as vibrations on his skin, in his head. He feels uniquely exposed, and he feels it all the more acutely when he meets Bruno's gaze. He finds no judgement there, in Bruno's eyes. He finds—that look—no one has really, truly ever _seen_ him before. Overlooked him, yes. Ignored him, yes. Never probed too deeply into his life, personal or public, yes. This is almost… too much. Bruno brings his other hand to squeeze both of Giorno's. His eyes are very watery, and he feels Gold Experience force their way to the surface of his consciousness, alarmed at Giorno's distress.

"Right," he says, taking a few deep breaths. "We should probably be getting back to the others." He needs to… regroup. Carefully put himself back together. Hide the pieces. He feels jagged, raw.

"I'm sorry, Giorno." Giovanna says with a kiss to his hair before pulling away. "That must have been a lot for you."

Giorno feels a flush of all-encompassing disbelief. "A lot for _me_?" he says, voice going high with disbelief. "_You're_ the one that was just bleeding out on the floor, and _you're_ the one that's acting like it was no big deal."

He feels Giovanna shrug, and that shrug annoys him even more than he can describe. "At some point attempts on your life get a bit passé."

"Passé," Giorno repeats. He looks between Bruno and Giovanna, and where Giovanna affects indifference, Bruno looks at him with concerned eyes. He feels exposed under that gaze.

"Giorno," Bruno says while still holding his hands, "this is the world that you're a part of now." He had known this, of course. He knew this when Bruno had approached him on the train, after killing Luca. He had known this when he had killed Polpo. He had known this when he had seen Diavolo. Giorno _knows_ this. It doesn't mean that he has to _accept_ it.

Bruno lets go of his hands, and immediately he misses the warmth of them, and he can only watch mutely as Bruno goes to pick up Trish hand, which had been left by the column where he had been hiding before the fight.

Seeing that arm jogs Giorno's memory. "I already re-grew her hand," he says, and Bruno turns to him after picking it up, "back after our fight with the Boss. But I can," Giorno makes a come-here gesture with his fingers, and when Bruno gives him the hand, he changes it into a bouquet of bright magenta tulips. _At the very least_, he thinks to himself, _I can keep these alive_.

Giovanna sighs, and turns towards the stairs. "Tell me about that fight while we go to the others."

* * *

"I swear," Naracia says with more energy than Giovanna thought he would have, considering the type of wound Giorno had just described. _But then again_, he thinks to himself, _Narancia was always able to bounce right back up_. "Fugo was still in the boat when I ran to help the others."

Giovanna sits down on the steps to the pier without making any noise, despite desperately wanting to sigh. "Right," he says. There are a million and one things that could have happened. There is the Pannacotta Fugo, who he knows a decade into the future, who lives his life isolating himself from remorse, and who goes to therapy for his anger issues, and then there is _this_ Pannacotta Fugo, a 16 year old boy who had apparently yelled at Mista before simmering in the boat with Narancia. And now, Fugo is gone.

"Did he say anything to you?" Mista asks, sitting down besides Giovanna, "anything at all?" Giovanna feels tugging on his blazer, and when he looks over he sees Mista looking pointedly at the blood stains on his clothes. _Later_, he mouths.

Narancia shakes his head and attempts to get up, before being pushed by Bruno back into the boat to lie down. "He wouldn't even look at me!" Narancia says from his former position, stretched out on one of the seats. Giorno sits between Narancia and Trish, and Bruno sits at the stern, near Narancia. Abbacchio is seated on the stairs, like Giovanna and Mista are.

Giovanna searches Bruno's face, which is turned towards the water. He's forgotten to clean the blood off his cheeks, and now it sits in dried flakes on his skin, uneven streaks as bits have fallen off. Bruno must feel Giovanna's gaze, and he looks up, brows furrowed and mouth frowning.

There is a quality to Bruno's eyes that Giovanna does not understand. He has thought of them often, more times than he can count. But his imagination can only go so far, and thus the only view he's had of Bruno's eyes are the ones that he can remember. And, generally speaking, Bruno was never looking at him like this—with his lower lip caught between his teeth, clenched so hard that Giovanna's sure Bruno will break the skin if he keeps at it. Bruno is alive, and the distance between them has never felt so far before.

"It's not your fault," Giovanna's says when he sees Bruno give his lip a particularly forceful chew. "If Fugo left, then that was his own choice to live with—"

"And if the Boss took him? What then?" Bruno interjects. Giovanna watches those blue eyes startle down and then back up, so quickly he would have missed the movement had he not been looking. He follows Bruno's gaze and sees that Giorno has reached a hand over Narancia's seat to touch Bruno's. Mista's words interrupt Giovanna's thoughts before he can feel jealousy over his younger self, but it still sits under his skin all the same.

"The only person the Boss wants to kill is Trish," Mista says, and his words visibly cause Trish to shake, who had been sitting there in otherwise unmoving silence. She turns her gaze towards the two of them, eyes bouncing between himself and Mista. "And last time the Special Squad left him alone, and they only came after us."

Bruno does indeed break his skin, as Giovanna thought he would. The blood is bright against his lips. He licks them before speaking. "Assuming the best case scenario, that still leaves us with two Bosses to deal with." Abbacchio snorts, but does not look up from where he's rested his chin against his chest, and closed his eyes.

"We need to go to Rome," Giovanna says, ignoring whatever Abbacchio must have wanted to convey with that noise. Bruno looks at him again, still frowning, still biting his lip. "There's a man there from the Speedwagon Foundation," at this Bruno's mouth opens, and evidently he must know who they are, but Giovanna continues, "and he has the Arrow."

"The Arrow?" Giorno asks. "You mentioned arrows before. Is this one related to that?"

Mista answers. "Yeah, except this one can make your stand do all kinds of weird shit, like this one." He jerks a thumb in Giovanna's direction, and Giovanna lightly bats it away.

"It was instrumental in defeating the Boss the last time."

Bruno nods, and with his nodding his hair falls back in front of his face. He pushes some of it back behind his right ear, and looks at everyone in his group, Trish included. Eventually his gaze finds Giovanna's again, and now _this_, this is a look that Giovanna knows well. Bright. Sharp. It cuts Giovanna, as it always did. Even with the span of a decade, he remembers this feeling well.

"We're going to Rome."

* * *

**A/N:** The next 3 weeks are the end of the semester, AND I have to finalize my proposal. I basically told myself that if I didn't get anything out by the end of this week you'd all be waiting another month-ish. So... rejoice!


	4. It's Always You, Part I

**Summary of chapter 1:** We begin with Giorno in Port St. Lucie, Florida. It is revealed that he had received a letter from one Father Pucci, who warned of the Speedwagon Foundation having duplicitous intentions with calling Giorno over stateside for a meeting. Throughout the meeting Enrico seems to be trying to find something in Giorno, and they keep bringing up Giorno's father and the other Brando siblings. Giorno is unable to confirm Enrico's information, due to the short time frame. They offer to meet again, but Enrico seems unsatisfied. Later that evening Mista and Giorno call up Trish, who seems to be having issues that she won't tell them about. She hangs up rather abruptly. The meeting with the SPW goes poorly. When they arrive it appears that the Foundation has been put in disarray due to unspecified events in which Dr. Kujo was put in a coma just the evening prior. The meeting with the three representatives also goes poorly. However Enrico's information has borne some fruit, and the revelation of this knowledge puts Giorno in an even worse position with the Foundation. After a tense conversation Giorno leaves, taking Passione support to the Foundation with him. The chapter ends when, somehow, while out on the beach with Mista in the early morning, something seems to rip the both of them out of their own world.

**Summary of chapter 2:** Our chapter begins with Giorno staring at a man he finds incredibly familiar. That man is somehow himself, but a decade older. And apparently this version of himself has brought with him an older Guido Mista and vampires. There is a short but bizarre fight. Older Giorno does not have Gold Experience but another stand, and it shoots a ray of light at the vampires. There is a conversation about traveling through time and to different dimensions, and the rets of the Buccellati gang in 2001 have their own difficulties believing the tale. Older Mista and Older Giovanna give a brief overview of their situation. The older pair reveal what they know to be true of the Boss' plans, and the rest of them deal with this information in their own ways. Bruno Buccellati agrees to work with older Giovanna, under the assumption that this information is true. There is a brief conversation outside of Coco Jumbo's stand between the two Giornos, older Mista, and Bruno. After the older two leave Bruno and Giorno have their own conversation in which they discuss the nature of stands.

**Summary of chapter 3:** Giovanna and Mista arrive at the San Giorgio Maggiore Church before the Buccellati gang. It is early. When Bruno and co arrive they discuss the Boss' orders, and Giovanna says that regardless of orders he will be going in shortly after Bruno. He makes good on his word. He goes down to the basement and instead of the Boss that he was expecting there is another. This Boss is his Boss, the one that Giovanna had condemned to infinitely many not-deaths with non of the mercy of death. Apparently one of the Boss' not-deaths had been at the hands of Black Sabbath's arrow, and he had been gifted a stand that allowed him to circumvent the particulars of Requiem's abilities. The Boss of this world walks by with Trish in his arms. A fight ensues between Giovanna and his Boss. Eventually Bruno shows up, and the time of them try to deal with this new stand, which can somehow reverse time and has an unusual effect on Requiem, causing Giovanna to be unable to call his stand. The three of them hear Giorno's voice at the top of the stairs and The Boss goes to deliver a fatal blow to Giovanna. Then we take a half step backwards, to the scene Giovanna left on the docks. There are the two Mistas, younger Giorno, Fugo, Narancia, and Abbacchio. Giorno and Mista get restless. Mista concocts a plan to go around the church and wait in the garden maze in the back in order to ambush the Boss. Fugo does not agree. Narancia is unsure. The rest go and plan, and lie in wait. Their ambush does not work, and they end up fighting the Boss, the Boss of this world. Just when it seems like they might prevail the Boss instead attacks Narancia, who had eventually decided to join the fray, and the Boss disappears. Then we see young Giorno and young Guido run into the church to find Bruno and Giovanna. Giorno finds the two in the basement. Our chapter ends when the group of them sans Fugo rejoin on the docks. None of them know where Fugo is. They agree that their next step is to go to Rome, to find the individual that Giovanna says was instrumental in their ability to defeat the Boss the last time they fought.

* * *

It seems that, contrary to popular belief, not all roads lead to Rome. Bruno had wanted to stop for food, but Giovanna had been insistent that they not delay in leaving Venice. He had also seemed to acquire a case of aquaphobia, and would not rest until they were hurtling down the A13 motorway. Transportation by boat, plane, and train had been summarily dismissed. Giovanna would brook no argument—he put himself behind the wheel of their piteously plain gray Fiat, and had driven the forty or so kilometers to Padua in white-knuckled silence. In the still early morning light they hit little traffic. Giorno finds himself both looking at the deep red stain on Giovanna's jumpsuit and blazer through the driving mirror, and trying to be subtle in his inspection of the older Mista through the corner of his eye, who sits off to Giorno's right in the back seat, Coco Jumbo in his lap. Giorno can just see the sleeves of Bruno's jacket from his position in the back, and Bruno has his face turned to the passenger side window. Bruno's sleeves are still red, but the color has dulled somewhat from what it was in the church. They'd need to change if they didn't want to attract attention. Two men in white outfits, covered in blood? Not entirely subtle.

"Is there a reason," Giorno says, breaking the silence, "that we didn't go south on the SS 309?" Giorno sees when Giovanna looks at him through the driving mirror.

"To avoid the coast."

"I'm sure you are already aware that we will hit the Po River regardless of what motorway we take."

Giorno catches Mista's amused huff, which he tries to keep under his breath. He does not similarly bother in trying to hide his words. "A firecracker, huh?" Giorno turns to face Mista fully, and those dark eyes are at once both familiar and unfamiliar. Mista's expression is too fond for comfort, and it makes Giorno want to move away from the look but he keeps his own gaze steady.

"I don't think that it's unreasonable to have questions and want answers." Giorno cuts his gaze back to Giovanna's in the driving mirror. Those green eyes look away almost immediately after they lock with his own, and he wonders if Giovanna saw the same gaze, reflected. "I expect you to make good on your word from last night."

Giorno's words come out sharper than he had intended, and he can feel Mista still watching him. He tries to shake whatever has settled in his stomach, but it keeps coming back. The way—the way the blood had pooled under Giovanna—the way it had _felt_ to have to put his hands down into—Giorno clenches his fingers into his palms. His nails still have dark flecks under where he couldn't properly clean them off, and the sleeves of his jacket are… uncomfortably crusty. He remembers how his hair had swung down and swung through the mess on Giovanna's chest, and how he hasn't been able to wash up. Giovanna's indifference to this all is…

For a moment the only sound is the aggravating beep of the turn signal as Giovanna merges into the travel lane to overtake a few cars that had apparently not been travelling sufficiently fast enough, despite the fact that they had already been going much faster than the speed limit.

"The last time we were attacked by two members of the Special Squad," Giovanna eventually says, once he seems suitably mollified by the speed at which they're currently hurtling down the motorway.

"The Special Squad?" Bruno asks from his position, right cheek squished against the passenger side window. Giorno watches as Bruno turns around with a deliberate sort of carefulness that doesn't quite make sense. At least, not when Giorno considers the context of their situation—two of himself in the car, one of the Guidos, and Bruno. A dangerous group, to be sure, but of no danger to Bruno. The tone of his voice though. It has an undercurrent of something that Giorno had not even heard the first time he and Bruno had discussed killing the Boss. It doesn't even sound the same as what shook Bruno's words back in Venice, when he had bitten clean through his lip after learning of Fugo's disappearance. Giorno suppresses his shiver when Bruno turns an eye his way, but that eye sweeps away in mere moments to rest on Giovanna. "The Special Squad," Bruno repeats, voice flat in a way that Giorno intimately recognizes.

"Yes," Giovanna answers. Giorno watches Giovanna look at Bruno from the corner of his eyes but other than that Giovanna does not turn to acknowledge Bruno. "I don't remember the fight very well, on account of having been unconscious for a good majority of it. I do, however, remember the stand that attacked me."

"Which was?" Bruno asks from his spot. He leans towards Giovanna with a hand on the dashboard, his hand splayed out and disturbing the fine dust that had settled there, causing nearly imperceptible dust motes to scatter in the air in a shower that catches the light in a dull sort of glint the way that sand might. Giorno wonders where the previous owners had taken their vehicle, before they had taken it for themselves. He wonders where they'll end up taking it, and if the previous owner would ever see it again. He doubts it. They'd probably just have more problems if the owner tried to track them down.

Giovanna's pause is considering. "A fish," he says eventually.

"A fish?" Giorno watches as Bruno spreads his fingers out even further on the dashboard, and he leans closer to Giovanna.

"An _elasmobranch_ fish. A subclass of Chondrichthyes," Giovanna tilts his head slightly towards Bruno, and from Giorno's seat he can see the faintest curve of Giovanna's lip around the right side of his face. "Better known as a cartilaginous fish."

Bruno looks at Giorno, and his brows have disappeared behind the curtain of his bangs. Giorno answers his question before he can ask it. "The stand was a shark."

Bruno turns back to Giovanna. "You couldn't just say that?"

Giorno watches that curve of Giovanna's lips dip deeper. "I could have. In any case, it was a shark that could jump from liquid to liquid and change it size accordingly."

"And what about the other stand?"

Silence again as Giovanna drives. Just as it looks like Bruno is going to ask again, Giovanna speaks. "Guido," he says with a contemplative frown, "do you remember…?"

Beside Giorno he feels Mista shift in the backseat. A Mista in thought is a Mista in motion, and that has not changed for a Mista a decade older. Thinking is a whole-body affair, and Mista moves his arms to a conversation to which only he is privy, and he jiggles his legs in what might have served as a soothing gesture, but only serves to shake Giorno in his seat. Or maybe Giorno is simply hyper aware of the motions and movements of Mista in the way that Giorno always gets keen-eyes and focused when people move near him. Either way, Mista's several moments of not-so-quiet contemplation do their best to shoot Giorno's nerves.

Eventually Mista speaks, but the words do not inspire confidence in Giorno. "There was something on Narancia's tongue? And I think it made him say things. Ring any bells, Buccellati?"

Bruno shakes his head, and tucks his hair behind his ears. Distressingly, Giorno notices that there is a cluster of sunspots right on Bruno's skin where his ear connects to his face. Giorno pries his attention away from the side of Bruno's face and to Coco Jumbo, who seems to be trying to escape its prison of Mista's bright yellow leopard spotted jeans.

"As Polpo's sub-capo I was aware of other groups, but not overly so. And the Boss' elite subdivision… I expect they must be following us, if they found you in Venice the other time."

"Which is why," Giovanna interjects, "we're going to avoid the water as much as possible. And planes."

"That will only delay the inevitable. And as Giorno said, we will cross the Po as we cross into Emilia-Romagna." Giorno can see Bruno turn to him in his peripheral vision, but he does not look to make sure. His mind, which should be focusing on the fact that they are currently, possibly, being chased by the Boss' elite guard, is instead caught on the fact that Bruno probably has more sunspots on the other side of his face. And if Giorno were to just look—he doesn't, and instead he takes one of the magazines thrown haphazardly on the floor of their stolen car, and turns the pages into dandelions for Coco Jumbo. The tortoise eats the flowers with great gusto, and Giorno can feel both Mista and Bruno watching him.

"I would prefer a fight further inland than one in a lagoon." Giovanna sighs at the wheel. "We have one hundred kilometers until we hit Bologna. We'll pass over the Po in half of that. You either have half an hour to ask your questions, or an hour, if we somehow manage to not get attacked by the river."

Giorno is left with no dandelions, and no reason to keep looking down. He looks up, and thankfully not into Bruno's eyes. "Buccellati," Giorno says, "you should ask first."

For some reason this makes Bruno laugh. "If this is out of some misplaced deference to my rank, Giorno, don't bother. I think you should be allowed to talk to… yourself first. But _you_," Bruno turns back to Giovanna, "don't think that I've forgotten this morning. If I say that my team needs to rest and eat, then they will rest and eat."

Giovanna tilts his head in Bruno's direction but does not take his eyes off the road. "I understand and apologize, Capo Buccellati."

"Oh, don't be like that, Giovanna. There's no need for titles."

"I mean no disrespect." Giovanna says, letting his words hang. Giorno hears the _but_ even when Giovanna never continues his sentence out loud.

Bruno speaks when he sees that Giovanna will not. "It would sound odd, after all."

"What would?" Giovanna has not yet left the travel lane, despite the fact that they passed any cars there were to pass several long minutes ago.

"You calling me _capo_, or even _Buccellati_. You've been calling me by my first name ever since we met you."

Giovanna takes his eyes off the road. Giorno watches him do it, and is silently thankful that there are no other cars on the road. "Have I?" Giovanna asks while looking at Bruno. Bruno looks back. "I hadn't noticed."

"I did." Bruno goes to push his hair behind his ears again, but remembers what Giorno has been keenly aware of this entire time. Instead Bruno leaves a hand by his ear, and runs his fingers over the skin where all the sunspots are.

"Would you prefer that I call you by your surname?" Giovanna still has not turned back to the road. Giorno is torn between watching the road, and watching Giovanna and Bruno watch each other. The latter wins with the very convincing argument of being able to see Bruno rub the side of his face, and being able to count the number of sunspots that are normally hidden by the hang of Bruno's bob.

"No, it's fine." Bruno's hand stops rubbing his skin, and Giorno is left with the image of seeing those sunspots from between Bruno's fingers, and how some of his nails have been bitten so badly that the skin on his cuticles is painful-looking and red. "I don't mind."

In this situation, in a tiny Fiat, speeding down the motorway, with three other people and a tortoise, Giorno should not feel like he's intruding on anything. And yet here he is, distinctly struck with the sense of—The weight of a name, he supposes. He knows that well, having chosen his own. Giorno's thoughts stutter and shudder to a stop, caught on the idea—_names_. Bruno is—back in the church. He had mentioned—_binders_. Bruno himself—_Bruno Buccellati is trans_. Giorno involuntarily jerks forward in his seat, towards the space between the driver's and the passenger's side, and causes Bruno and Mista to look at him again.

"Is something wrong, Giorno?"

"Your name," Giorno gets out in a rush, "that _is_—you _want_—it's—"

Bruno's eyes are wide with alarm. "_Breathe_ Giorno. Whatever you have to say can wait—"

"Your _name_ is Bruno, right? We're not—I'm not—" Giorno is cut off by Bruno's spluttering, which quickly transforms into Bruno hunched over the center console, hands braced on the storage compartment that juts out between himself and Giovanna.

"Giorno," Bruno manages to say between breathless laughs, and Giorno is tempted to turn Bruno's own advice back to him, "_yes_, that is the name I go by."

"Oh." Giorno scootches back into his seat, and away from where Bruno is still wheezing into the center console. "I just wanted to make sure." Giorno moves as far as he can, and resists the urge to squish into the car door.

Bruno must hear something in Giorno's voice, as does Giovanna, who makes to turn around before thinking better of it. "I'm not laughing at you," Bruno says while catching his breath, "I was caught off-guard. No one has ever been so worried about calling me the right name before."

"Well," Giorno swallows. He swallows at the intensity of Bruno's smile, at the flush that's rushed to Bruno's cheeks, at the way Bruno's eyes—they _glitter_. Giorno's never seen a man's eyes _gleam_ like that, and certainly never seen them directed at himself, ever. He finds that his throat is suddenly dry. "They should," Giorno says a bit helplessly.

"Thank you, Giorno."

"Alright, you've lost me," Mista interrupts, and his voice reminds Giorno that yes, there are indeed other people in the car. Giorno runs a worried hand over his braid, and tries to turn a casual eye to Mista. He hopes that his eyebrows, which he felt shoot up his forehead involuntarily at Mista's words, are well hidden by his hairstyle, but he has little hope.

Bruno is the one that speaks first. "What do you mean?"

"Were we supposed to be calling you something else?" Mista leans forward, placing his elbows on his knees and his chin on his hands, effectively trapping Coco Jumbo on his lap, who had been attempting the greatest prison escape seen on this side of the century.

Bruno, who has now put his upper body squarely into the space between the driver's and passenger's seat in order to face both Giorno and Mista, looks as confused as Mista sounds. Because of how Bruno has turned to look at Mista, Giorno can now see the other side of Bruno's face, and it is with distracted disappointment that Giorno notes the lack of sunspots by Bruno's right ear.

"No…?" Bruno says while still facing Mista.

Mista looks between Bruno and Giorno, and then he looks some more. It seems that it is not only a Mista in thought that is a Mista in motion, and his body moves towards whoever is the current object of his gaze, no matter how short that may be.

"Oh, huh," Mista says after what feels like ages. Giorno wishes that he had been sitting where Mista is, if only so that he could have counted the number of sunspots— "So. You're like Giorno? Got it." Mista pretends to shoot two guns at Bruno with his pointer fingers and thumbs, and Bruno takes his own time looking at Giorno and then back again at Mista.

"I never told you?"

"Well, it's not like you exactly advertised it." Mista moves his chin to free a hand, which he then brings to the back of his head. He scratches at his hair with an awkward air. "And I guess it's not really a thing that comes up in conversation, right?" Mista hand and his thoughts must both get snagged—his fingers on a knot and his mind on something neither Giorno nor Bruno can see. But whatever it is, it brightens Mista's face with a wide toothy smile. "I mean, take Giorno, I mean, Giovanna," Mista gestures with his other free hand, "it took him, what, five, six years to come out to the rest of us?"

Giovanna speaks up around Bruno. "Thereabouts, yes."

"Right." Mista nods, as if this explains everything. Evidently Bruno is as confused as Giorno, because his face has not changed from when his brows first furrowed in confusion.

"But, Mista, you've known me for longer than you've known Giovanna."

It's Mista's turn to look confused, and he does so with a frown that pulls his lips down and scrunches his chin. "Nah, I've known Giovanna for almost a decade."

"And so it would stand to reason that you've known me for one year more, wouldn't it?"

Mista's face gets a—a peculiar look to it, and Giorno watches the color leach out of Mista's cheeks like paint drops in water. Mista goes to speak, his mouth opens, and Giorno sees those lips start to form words, but Giovanna speaks over him.

"This is not how I had planned to tell you." Bruno's head jerks back, and Giorno watches his pupils pull to the corners of his eyes towards the driver's seat. Bruno's body shortly follows, and he goes back to his previous position with his hands on the center console, this time looking at Giovanna. His hand finds a different spot on the dashboard but the dust floats up all the same. There's no discernable shape left in the grey coating the dashboard—only lines that might be attributed to fingers, and splotches that might be attributed to palms. But even then it might be questionable, considering how much Bruno had moved his hand around. Giorno imagines that Bruno won't be able to easily wipe off his hands, especially not on the pants of his white suit.

"Planned on telling me _what_?"

Giovanna breathes deeply through his mouth, and then exhales through his nose. "You're dead, Bruno. At least, you are in our world." Giovanna does not take his eyes off the road, but he does take several more deep breaths.

"For how long?"

"About ten years."

"I see." Bruno looks down at the center console, and his eyes become barely visible slits of blue beneath his eyelashes. "The Boss?"

"Yes." Giovanna does not turn away from the road. Giorno hides the sound of his own breathing by timing it with the breaths of Giovanna, who audibly breathes in and then breathes out in measured moments. Bruno does not look back up. But Bruno must find something while staring down at his hands, and he connects dots that Giorno had not even been considering. In all honesty though, Giorno thinks that he wouldn't have been very good at much, not after hearing that Bruno was dead in another world, and at the Boss' hands.

"You insisted on following me into the church," Bruno says. It's not a question, but it feels like one to Giorno.

"That I did."

Bruno hums. Giorno sees him gnaw at his bottom lip, which is still bitten raw from when Bruno had found out that Fugo was missing.

"Did I die there?" The sound of Giovanna swallowing is audible above all else in the car. Giorno's throat is too dry to do the same, or else he would have. Bruno asks his next question without giving Giovanna a moment to answer. "Was that basement my grave?"

"I need to," Giovanna swallows again. "Let me pull over."

Bruno looks up. "You're the one driving, aren't you?"

Bruno's answer is the sound of the turn signal, which is no less annoying than it was when Giovanna used it to merge into the travel lane, but now he uses it to get over to the shoulder of the motorway. Giovanna slows the car to a stop, and then lets the engine idle while he turns to Bruno, who looks back at him.

"Your body died there," Giovanna says after the longest seconds of Giorno's life have finally passed. Giorno finds himself torn between both leaning towards the two of them, and then squishing further back into his seat. He stays paralyzed where he is, helpless to be an unwilling audience of this conversation.

"I didn't realize," Bruno says while tilting his head to the side, "that something other than the body could die."

Giorno knows what Giovanna is going to say before he says it. "Your soul." Giovanna doesn't elaborate.

"You didn't strike me as the religious type, Giovanna. But I have a feeling that's not quite what you mean, is it?"

Mista shifts in his seat, and his movements make Giorno realize that up until now, he had been relatively still. Giorno does not turn to look at him.

"Diavolo killed your body but your… life energy came back." Giovanna brings a hand up to rub at his cheek, and he keeps it up by his face.

"Let me get this straight," Bruno says with an odd tone of voice, his voice pitched lower than Giorno has heard it before, "my body died, but somehow my soul kept me alive."

"Not alive," Giovanna says while covering his mouth. "Animated."

"Animated," Bruno repeats. He leans towards Giovanna with his head still tilted, and because of the angle Bruno is looking up at Giovanna, rather than the other way around. "You make it sound like I was some kind of zombie." It almost seems like Bruno is joking, but not quite.

Giovanna looks down at Bruno through his eyelashes, which Giorno knows must be the same shade as his own—a bright blonde that had greeted Giorno on the same day the rest of his hair had turned golden. "That wouldn't be an entirely inaccurate way of phrasing it."

Bruno smiles. It's not a happy smile. "I wasn't being serious when I said that. And what about the boss? Is he… animated as well?"

"The one from our world?"

"Unless there's another that I'm unaware of?" Bruno's smile curves in a way that Giorno is suddenly struck with the realization that _Bruno Buccellati has dimples_, but then those thoughts jump to how Bruno's lip is sure to scar if he keeps biting at it the way that he has.

"Well." Giovanna says in a tone that does the opposite of inspiring confidence but does a very good job at making Giorno sweat under his jacket. "There was a soul attached to the Boss', if that counts as there being another boss. Presumably they should exist here as well."

Mista jumps in with about as much energy as he is currently using to jiggle his left leg, and his words nip at the heels of Giovanna's. "JP said that something had fractured the Boss' soul, or that maybe he had been born with two people in one body, or…" Mista shakes a hand. "He has all these theories using some really old German stuff. I mean, but we don't _really_ know if the guy exists or not anyways. Or what he looks like. Dude couldn't even stay in his own body."

"Couldn't even stay in his own body," Bruno repeats, voice verging on something like incredulous. "What, did he have a stand to… leave his physical form?"

"The Boss' other half? Nah," Mista shakes his other hand, and Giorno wishes that he would just stop shaking, "JP's Requiem stand flipped everyone out of their own body and into someone else's. And it flipped this guy into—ah, it flipped him out too."

Bruno's eyes are sharp as he turns to Mista. Giorno can feel himself withering away from it, and it hadn't even been directed at him. "Into _whose_ body?"

Mista's shaking stops so suddenly it jostles Giorno in his seat with the absence of it and Bruno's eyes flicked in Giorno's direction before returning to Mista. "You and the Boss switched bodies. Or, the Boss Boss' body, but the other guy went into yours."

"Requiem stands," Bruno says while leaning out of the space over the center console but not quite returning to his seat, "do they always… you said this one could take souls from their bodies, and Giovanna's can… deny death. Are they always so…"

Giorno, who had been trying to make himself as unobtrusive as possible during this conversation finds himself compelled to speak before he can think better of it. "Deny death? Gold Experience has nothing to do with _death_."

"Giorno," Bruno says while shaking his head in the teen's direction, and his eyes are dark in a way that reminds Giorno of very late last night, or very early this morning, when Bruno had curled his fingers around Giorno's wrists, "_your_ Gold Experience gives life. But Requiem—"

"Also gives life." Giovanna cuts in, and something shimmers over his face before it fades away. "The reason why Diavolo will never reach the truth of his death is because he has been given life, in perpetuity."

Bruno is still looking at Giorno when he speaks. "You should have killed him." Bruno's eyes are still dark but the sky is not, and even if the sky had been dark with night and bright with stars Giorno would not have been able to see it reflected in Bruno's eyes—not like he had been able to last night. They're dark with something else.

"Death, at the time, seemed too kind. And I wanted something else."

Bruno finally looks away from Giorno in order to settle more properly in his seat, and when he turns to Giovanna he sounds more contemplative than truly angry. "And now he is my problem with which to deal."

That same something passes over Giovanna's face again but Giorno cannot decipher what it means. It looks almost like the faint glow of a stand, but Giorno's own Gold Experience had never been this particularly keen to be present in conversations with other people. Even now they feel settled under his skin, only faintly sparking at his thoughts towards them but not doing much else. He wonders what Requiem must want, and if Requiem was somehow separate from Giovanna in a way, or if Requiem was merely responding to one of Giovanna's thoughts. Giorno isn't sure, and something about the situation makes him not want to know.

Giovanna tilts his head. "This would be my problem, not yours."

"Did you honestly think that I would not be going to Rome with you? And the rest of them—they've made their decision."

"Then I imagine that you will not like what I have to say next."

Bruno returns to his previous position over the space between the front two seats, one hand on the center console and the other on the dashboard. "And what do you have to say?"

"It would be best if we split up. A group as large as ours is bound to attract attention—and this isn't even taking into consideration the fact that stand users attract other stand users."

"You were right," Bruno says while closing his eyes for the briefest of moments, "I didn't like what you had to say."

"I figured."

"Ignoring that," Bruno says while leaning closer to Giovanna. "Let's go back to your stand. Or rather, your stand's involvement in your appearance here. Am I supposed to believe that your trip back in time to another world to exactly the night before our first confrontation with the Boss was an accident? That it was just a remarkable coincidence of timing?"

Mista shifts in his seat again and this time Giorno does turn to look at him. Mista has wrangled Coco Jumbo back into his lap, but his eyes are squinted, staring straight at Giovanna. His frown is deep and his eyes are dark. Without a cap Giorno can see the wrinkles on Mista's forehead, and the way his thick eyebrows move with every thought. Giorno remembers the way that Fugo had interrogated Giovanna about Requiem, and their ability to go back in time. Giorno remembers how Giovanna had said that Requiem had chosen the paths, and Giorno remembers how passionately Fugo had described _time_.

_Stands_, Giorno thinks to himself. He does not know how the arrow had changed Gold Experience, but he thinks that maybe _changed_ would not be the best way to describe it.

"I did not plan to go back in time, if that's what you're implying."

"But I imagine, that once you realized what was happening, you must have had… some influence on the destination."

"I mean," Mista interrupts, eyes now on Bruno, "Giovanna was pretty out of it after each time skip. I don't think—you didn't see him. It hit him harder than it hit me."

Bruno does not turn to look at Mista. "But what is Requiem, if not an extension of Giovanna's desires?"

"No," Mista says, the word sharp on his tongue.

"No?"

"Requiem's powers are… vast. But even that would be beyond them."

"And how do you know, Mista? How would any of us know the extent of their abilities?"

Mista snorts. Loud. It startles Giorno, and it startles both Giovanna and Bruno out of their staring. All their eyes find Mista, and he doesn't even have the good decency to look uncomfortable under their collective scrutiny. "I know because if Requiem _could_, they would have done it ages ago. _Years_ ago. They would have never waited this long."

Giorno turns back to Giovanna, whose hand is still covering his mouth. Giorno sees what he hopes the others do not—as with the conversation back inside Mr. President, Giorno can see the ways in which his expressions have not changed in ten years, and he can see how carefully Giovanna is working to make his expression appear to be on the more positive side of neutral. His eyebrows are expertly not scrunched but instead relaxed on the curve of his brow, and his eyes are wide open, but not too wide. With his hand over his mouth, no one would be able to see Giovanna's frown, which Giorno knows must be hiding under that palm. There had been an offer. There must have been at least one.

But Bruno must believe Mista, and he settles back into his seat and away from Giovanna, head pressed against his chair so that he can see roughly into the backseat and still keep the driver's side in his view.

"I'm sorry," Bruno says with a sigh. "I just—reality-bending stands are difficult enough to accept, but the possibility of a stand that can control time to such an extent… Even if you are Giorno… you are still a man that I don't know. You understand, don't you?"

"I do," Giovanna says while finally moving his hand, and it seems for a moment that he is about to return to the task of driving them to Bologna, before Bruno stops him with a considering hum.

"This is not how I imagined getting the answer to one of my questions."

"Which was?"

"I was going to ask what the exact nature of our relationship is, in your world. You've—you mentioned my binders, and being at my house. And I don't…"

"Ah." Now Giovanna really does seem to intend to return to driving, and he has one hand on the wheel and one by the keyhole, vines already sprouting from the metal.

"What I do wonder though," Bruno continues, crossing his arms in front of his chest and giving Giorno and Mista a wonderful view of his profile again, and of those sunspots by his left ear, "is what became of my affairs. I assume that I gave the house to you, Giovanna, since you mentioned having been in it."

The ignition starts in earnest, with the turn of a few well-grown vines and the car rumbles to life beneath them. "You gave it to Trish, actually. But then you did extend the offer to myself." Giovanna gets back onto the motorway, and he returns to his previous breakneck speed, despite the fact that there are now other cars on the road, presumably for the morning commute to work. It's early enough that there aren't too many, but there will be, and quickly.

"Since we're asking questions," Mista says while finally letting Coco Jumbo escape his lap, who immediately tries to get off the backseat and get to the magazines on the floor, which it must now associate with the dandelions that Giorno had made earlier. "Giorno, it kind of sounded like you didn't know about Buccellati…? I mean, _me_, sure, but _you_…?"

"What do you mean, Guido?" Giovanna asks, his attention now back to the road.

"I was asking younger Giorno but I guess I can ask you too. Back like ages ago, you said that you and Bruno had come to an… _understanding_." Once again Mista is back to gesticulating with his hands, and moving so much that it shakes the seat. Giorno wishes that he had the option to sit somewhere else, but is unfortunately stuck with this vibrating ball of energy that masquerades as a man.

"An understanding about my place in Passione, yes."

Mista rubs a thumb over his nose. "Your place in Passione, _below_ Buccellati, right?"

"Well," a car honks as Giovanna weaves through a few of them, and Giorno has gone straight back to watching the road with an anxious focus. He's fairly sure that his own driving is not this harrowing, but then again, he has never been a passenger in a car that he was currently driving. The thought makes him shudder. "I had never anticipated becoming Don, no. Not if it had gone differently." Mista is quiet for several moments, and Giorno is still not entirely sure what answer he is looking for. Whatever it is, it hasn't been the ones that Giovanna had just given him.

Giorno bends down and turns a magazine into as many dandelions as it can possibly become, and he places the tortoise next to the veritable field. Coco Jumbo begins to chomp away without hesitation. "What are you trying to ask, Mista?"

"You know what, forget it. It was a stupid question anyways."

Giorno looks up from where he is tending his dandelion garden, and straight into Bruno's eyes, who is watching Giorno wave a flower in front of Coco Jumbo's face.

"Giorno," Bruno says while settling back into his seat and facing his window, "it would seem that you are the only one who hasn't asked something. And we don't have much time left until we reach the Po."

Giorno sits back up, leaving Coco Jumbo to its dandelions. He can see Mista watching him as he gets settled, but when he looks into the driving mirror he doesn't find the eyes that he had been hoping to see. Giovanna must be focusing on the road, now that there are other people about.

"Drugs," Giorno says before he can think of a better way to phrase his non-question. "You're the Don, aren't you? So you must have been… successful."

"Depends on how you define _successful_." Giovanna says.

Giorno sees when they pass a sign declaring Bologna to be eighty kilometers away. They have maybe twenty until they cross the Po. He looks back at the driving mirror. "I felt that I had been fairly clear when I had told Buccellati my plans."

"Perhaps too clear," Bruno says from his seat, body still turned away from the rest of them and forehead pressed into the glass of the passenger side window, "had anyone else heard you, you would surely be dead right now."

_But it hadn't been just anyone_, Giorno thinks. He would not know how to even begin approaching what he felt when he had fought Bruno that day. Regardless of how he would describe it, he knows now what he knew then, and Bruno has not done anything to dissuade that belief.

"Wait a minute," Mista says while shifting again and resting his right foot on his left knee, "was Fugo right?"

"About what?" Giovanna asks.

Mista leans forward, putting his weight on his crossed leg. "The traitor thing. I thought that he was just being… confused and angry about this whole situation, but… this _understanding_—" Mista pauses, turning his head to stare at Giorno. Giorno meets his gaze but does not understand the look. Giovanna has answered Mista's questions perhaps a touch literally, but Giorno had thought that maybe Mista had indeed meant them as just that. But now he thinks that maybe this was his olderself's way of… avoiding the issue. Giorno thinks that it would be hard to miss what Mista was trying to imply, but the suggestion had been so, so _alien_ to even consider. Was this what everyone else thought? That Giorno had been placed on the team as some sort of…? _No_. Regardless of what the others thought, Giorno was sure of one thing, and that was what he had seen on Bruno's face, back in Naples. And if _this_ was how his olderself had chosen to deal with Mista's assumptions, then this would be how Giorno would treat them as well.

"Traitor…?" Giorno asks while still meeting Mista's eyes, and he pulls his brows up, and leaves his mouth slightly open. He doesn't let Mista look at his expression for long. "If wanting to stop gangsters from selling drugs to children makes me a traitor…"

Mista squints. "Interfering with Passione business would definitely make you _something_. I can see why you would have been dead if you had told this to anyone but Buccellati. But how did you even get on the subject to begin with? This isn't exactly something you bring up casually with a gangster. _And_—" Mista punctuates with a wild gesture of his hand, pointing at Giovanna, "—I remember that you said you fought Buccellati on the train! Not exactly the best place to be discussing anything."

It seems that Mista's enthusiasm has pulled Bruno away from the window and back to his spot leaning his weight against the center console, and Mista has to pull his hand away to avoid Bruno's face.

"We spoke after the fight," Bruno says, and all his moving has caused his hair to slip from where it was hastily pushed behind his ears.

"Guido," Giovanna cuts in, "there are really only so many ways to interpret _discussing the direction of Passione_."

Mista snorts. "Yeah, I'm beginning to see that."

Giorno has kept his eyes on Mista, and sees Mista's frown. _As always_, Giorno thinks to himself, _people expect something_. Giorno is acutely aware of what Mista has been trying to imply this entire conversation. But if his olderself has not broached the topic, then where would he start? Giorno doesn't even know how to describe how he feels about himself, let alone try to describe it to someone who has apparently been operating under this assumption for nearly a decade. And to think that about himself and Bruno… It makes his heart palpitate in the same way it does when he hears his classmates discuss who is and isn't attractive, and it makes his palms sweat in the same way they do when people approach him with the intent to get a date, or to persuade him to go back to their dorm room. He'd been called frigid. He'd been called a prude. He'd been told that it was healthy teenage exploration, and that it was expected and assumed that he would take a part of it, at some point. Maybe when he was older, in a few months, or a few years, but the expectation was the same: that he would, and that he would want to. But he didn't see himself getting over _this_, in much the same way he didn't see himself getting over The Gender Thing either. And he has his evidence, in his twenty-six year old self. At least, he thinks that he does. He hopes that he does. But this is… not something he wants to ask with an audience.

"Back to—" Giorno licks his lips, "—the topic of if you were successful or not—"

Giovanna cuts him off. "In the sense of _did we stop gangsters from selling drugs to children_, then yes, for the most part. We've significantly reduced it."

"Reduced? Not eliminated?"

"Fairly difficult to do so, especially when the Passione business model requires illegal drug sales to stay afloat."

"What do you mean?"

"At this point in time Passione can only smuggle drugs in due to the… good graces of the politicians that have been bought off. And then these drugs are first sold to their premium clientele, which includes funding all those cocaine-filled after-parties at every single fashion week and fashion house in this country. And what about the doping scandal with the Italian football league at the turn of the twenty-first century? Who do you think was involved in keeping the labs understaffed and underfunded, and ensured that maybe not even ten percent of the Italian footballers were tested?"

"This is," Bruuno says while bringing his hands back to his face again, and nervously twisting some hair between his fingers, "much worse than I had thought."

Mista snorts. "You haven't even heard the half of it, Buccellati. Selling to kids? That's only the bottom of the fucking barrel. They like to keep them coked up to their eyeballs, and by the time they get to their teens the mafia doesn't even have to lift a finger to get them crawling back. All part of the circle, the—" Mista snaps his right ring finger against his thumb before waving that same hand towards Giovanna, "what does Panna call it?

Despite the seriousness of their conversation Giovanna laughs. Or, not really so much as laughs, but exhales sharply, in a wordless sort of huff that passes through his nose more than it passes through his lips. "That doesn't necessarily apply here, Guido. Not if you're referring to Fugo's discussions of hermeneutics."

Mista snaps his fingers again, but this time with his middle finger. Giorno wishes that he would just pick one to use and stick with it. "That's the word—a hermeneutic circle."

"If we were discussing art, or a text, maybe." Giorno can hear the dismissal in Giovanna's voice. He's sure that everyone currently in the car can. Even Coco Jumbo, who is gnawing ineffectively at the corner of one of the magazines on the floor, could hear it in Giovanna's words. When Giorno flips the magazine over he sees that it's Vogue Italia the March edition with an editorial photographed by Steven Meisel. Giorno remembers that he hadn't been entirely too keen on it, back a few weeks ago when he had first seen it. He still isn't, it turns out, and he uses the pages to make more dandelions for Coco Jumbo. He listens to Mista while he's bent towards the tortoise, skimming the pages with a vaguely disinterested eye.

"Hear me out," Mista says while shifting in his seat, following the topic that Giovanna had tossed with all the focus of a dog with a bone, "isn't the point that we start somewhere, and then while going through all the pieces of the whole we return to the beginning with a new understanding of the whole process? So we've got these kids, maybe they got parents, maybe they don't, they get drawn into the wrong kinds of crowds, try a little of this, a little of that, and before you know it—wham, bam, thank you ma'am! You've got kids that are stuck doing the same thing over and over again, and all the others are doing it too. A never-ending bunch of hermeneutic circles."

"As fascinating as that application of hermeneutics is," Giovanna says while looking through the driving mirror, and Giorno sees the faintest lines of amusement wrinkling the corners of Giovanna's eyes, "I think you might be better served by the phrase _the addiction cycle_."

Mista sinks back into his seat with an overly exaggerated sigh, tossing his left arm over his eyes as he turns to rest his weight onto the passenger side door. "Sure. _Maybe_." Mista draws out the word while still hiding behind his arm, "But tell me that Panna wouldn't have tried to make some reference to some dead German guy or whatever."

"He's still doing that?" Bruno asks while unclipping the broaches in his hair and pushing his bangs off his forehead, even catching the strands that usually hang down the sides of his face. Giorno would have missed the motion had Bruno not spoken before fixing his hair, and Giorno watches Bruno reveal the curve of his forehead with the sort of interest that Giorno had not used while perusing the fashion spread at his feet. Bruno uses one broach to keep his hair pinned back and clips the other one to the collar of his jacket before turning to face Mista.

"Buccellati, you've got to hear him. It's gotten so much worse than when he was sixteen."

Bruno shakes his head but, because his hair is pinned back, Giorno does not get to see the way it would have swayed back and forth with the movement. He almost mourns the loss, had he not had a clear view of the way Bruno's eyebrows hike up his forehead as he closes his eyes with a smile. Giorno watches that smile with the sort of jealousy that comes from watching the almost effortless way that other people can lighten the tension in the way that he himself can't, but also with the sort of jealousy that comes from making—Giorno tamps down his thoughts with a firm hand, curling his nails into the meat of his palms to have something else to focus on.

"It sounds to me," Bruno says while opening his eyes, "that you're an avid listener of his lectures. Did he finally wear you down?"

Once again Mista proves that he is a man of motion, and his full body leans towards Bruno, moving away from his spot of dramatically resting his weight against the door to exaggeratedly brings a hand up by his cheek and his mouth.

In a gesture of faux-secrecy and in a voice that can only be described as a loud whisper, Mista speaks. "Panna's started going back to university. Classes here and there. But because of that he keeps bringing his work with him on missions." Mista directs his words at Bruno but Giorno sees the flicker of those dark eyes his way, and never let it be said that Mista does not know how to engage his audience. He shakes his other hand in a loose fist in the space between the passenger seats and the center dashboard, and Giorno watches this excess of energy with the sort of belated fascination he experiences whenever he sees people so carefree with their limbs and their expressions and their bodies. "It's _terrible_. He's in some literature theory course for something or another, and just last week he was trying to get me to debate Agamben's discussion of biopolitics." Mista shakes his fist again before pointing a finger in Bruno's direction. "While we were on a stake-out, might I add. I thought that was it, that I was just going to roll over and die while trying to focus on my binoculars and listen to him ramble on. What a pathetic obit that would've been, huh? _Here lies Guido Mista, killed by the ghosts of twentieth century philosophy past_."

This startles a laugh out of Bruno, who falters half-way to bringing a hand to cover his mouth. "I've certainly read worse, if that's any consolation."

"Worse? In this business? Nah—everyone else's obit must be like _he died of mysterious circumstances while visiting such-and-such town, leaving the entire country in a wake of confusion_." Mista shakes his fist again. "Just think about it—the drama! The intrigue! Those are the kind of deaths that they make those investigative documentaries about twenty years after the fact."

Mista makes Bruno laugh in a way that Giorno himself has not been able to. In a way that Giorno does not think that he would be able to even if he had spent more time with the team, in a way that makes him think about the times that he had been called _too serious to be fun to hang with_ by other classmates. He shakes the thought off and leaves Coco Jumbo to its magazines-turned-dandelion, and he settles himself back to the car door to which he is closest.

It seemed that this sort of good humor and story-telling was a constant about Mista, even a decade into the future. Giorno had seen the younger effortlessly draw even Abbacchio into the most bizarre of conversations with little more than a perfunctory grumble, and here he was now, speaking to Bruno in a way that Giorno didn't know if he could. Giorno looks out the window.

And very nearly startles himself with his squawk of surprise. "When—when were you going to—"

"Did you honestly think that I was unaware of how close we are to crossing in to Emilia-Romagna?" Giovanna asks, still behind the wheel, which is where he has been for the past hour plus change.

Giorno keeps his eyes focused on the scenery outside of the care, resisting the urge to look at Giovanna as he speaks. "A warning would have been appreciated."

"Very well," Giovanna says in the breeziest of tones, as if the idea of being attacked while hurtling down a motorway is not even the most stressful thing of his day, "we cross the Po in ten minutes. We will more than likely see the shark well before it decides to attack."

Giorno, still wary of the combination of cars and stand battles after their disastrous trip across the Ponte della Libertà, feels the objections crowd his throat before he can say them all. "We are _not_ having a fight while driving—"

"—Hey, Giorno, kid, don't worry about it—"

"—Don't you _dare_ call me a child." Giorno finds one of his fingers pointing at Mista's face before he can stop it, and the other man backs away while putting his hands up in what might have been a placating gesture, had the person making it not been Guido Mista sporting a terribly amused grin.

"Listen, all I wanted to say was that Giovanna and I are old hats at dealing with these sorts of situations." Mista still has his hands up, palms towards Giorno. Giorno cuts his eyes towards Bruno, who is watching the both of them in the back seat with a deep frown. The glow of Sticky Fingers is just beneath the surface of his skin, and it reflects oddly off his face. In the parts covered by his hair there is the faintest of blue that could be easily mistaken for the color of sun off of his hair in any ordinary circumstances, and in the spots where his skin is uncovered there is almost the impression of Sticky Finger's face over Bruno's, which makes it almost look like Bruno has something pulled over his eyes, even though they are wide open and staring back at Giorno. Giorno tilts his head in question. Bruno nods.

"The idea," Giovanna says, "is that, if they are waiting for us, they will not know that we know about them before the attack. And if they knew we were expecting them then they would surely change their plans."

Giorno does not turn to look at Giovanna. Neither does Bruno. "We don't even know if they're following us."

"That's true. And in the event that no one attacks us we can continue on, uninterrupted."

Bruno looks away first, turning towards Giovanna and returning to his spot by the center console. "If we are to trust you, you'll need to, at the very least, tell us your plans. We have maybe five minutes to prepare any sort of counter-attack."

"This entire car has been seeded," Giovanna says, keeping his eyes on the road. "Everywhere that I've touched has some sort of plant growing inside of it, creating a cage all around us. You can even ask your Giorno to confirm, if you don't believe me."

Bruno does not so much as twitch in Giorno's direction. He waits for a signal all the same. "And how will a cage of plants help us against a stand attack?"

"The living creatures created by Gold Experience," Giovanna says while moving one hand off the wheel to stroke along the dashboard with golden intent, "reflect the energy of an attack against them. And if, say, a shark were to leap at us and try to bite through this vehicle…" His words trail off, much as his palm trails across the parts of the car's interior that he can reach.

Giorno springs into action. Or, as much as he can while confined to the interior of a car. He skims his hands over the door next to him, feeling the plants that lay there still, germinating in the metal, and he encourages them with a soft whisper of Gold Experience's power. He flings himself to the other side and unceremoniously over Mista, who squawks about Giorno's "rough manhandling" but nevertheless moves out of the way, and Giorno finds what Giovanna had said that he would—the car has been well and thoroughly seeded. Giorno sees the sign for the Comune di Occhiobello before he sees the waters of the Po, and the Ponte Po causes him to sweat in a way that he wouldn't have just yesterday morning, before he and Guido had passed over the Ponte della Libertà.

"Ki—Giorno. Hey, buddy," Mista emphasizes with a pat to Giorno's side, but all he achieves is startling Giorno enough that Gold Experience's hand materializes to rip Mista's off of Giorno's lower right ribs. Mista puts up his free palm with a sheepish look. "Just wanted to tell you to stop worrying yourself into a mess. That's all."

Gold Experience is slow to let go, and Giorno feels a keen sense of embarrassment that is so sharp and all-encompassing that he almost forgets his anxiety. Almost, but not quite. He settles back into his seat but finds that he cannot _settle_, and Gold Experience shoves their other arm out before he can begin wrangling back the first. He feels the claw of dread—

"Do you doubt Gold Experience's abilities?" Giovanna asks, voice placid in a way that Giorno can see that the river in front of them is not.

Giorno's defense of their shared stand is quick. "Of course I don't—"

"Then why," Giovanna interrupts, sounds only mildly curious, as if the answer really doesn't matter to him at all, "are you so worried?" Giovanna doesn't even have the decency to spare a look at Giorno's way through the driver's mirror, but Giorno feels himself shuddering to a halt all the same.

"What…?" Giorno's voice sounds weak, even to himself. He can't bring himself to feel embarrassed about it. It's tiring, going from one extreme to another, and he's finding himself trying to latch onto something that doesn't make him feel jittery.

"Even if there is a part of you that does not trust yourself there is a part of you that trusts in your stand. Gold Experience will answer that trust," Giovanna says while finally looking in the driver's mirror, and the intent in his eyes has changed them in such a way that Giorno finds them almost unrecognizable, "you just have to give them _all_ of it."

The car does not suddenly swerve when they cross the Ponte Po, nor does a shark leap at them from the Po's dark waters. Mista has somehow amazingly materialized his gun from _somewhere_, and when Giorno looks him over to find any sort of hiding place he winks at points at his boots. Mista's red Chelsea boots cannot possibly be large enough to hide a revolver, even if it is the short-barreled kind, and Mista simply winks again when Giorno looks from boots to face with obvious incomprehension.

The handful of minutes it takes to cross the bridge may be some of the longest that Giorno has experienced yet, and even when they pass the other side he cannot contain the shake of useless energy in his limbs. It was all well and good for Giovanna to preach the virtues of completely putting your fate into the hands of your stand, but in practice…

"Well," Mista says with a smack of his lips that, for a moment, has Giorno wildly thinking of the sound of a gunshot before he can reign his thoughts in, "that was anticlimactic, wasn't it?"

"Don't jinx it, Mista." Giovanna chides in a voice that Giorno finds to be so overly-familiar it nearly stops him from thinking about anything else.

Bruno turns to the back seats again, still with the shadow of Sticky Fingers' helmet pulled over his eyes. His lopsided grin is back once again, and Giorno suffers for it. "What happened to your superstitious nature?" Bruno asks, and his lips curl almost impossibly more to one side.

"Ah, but Bruno, tell me how the evil eye can even possibly find us if you're carrying around your horn?" Something passes over Mista's face at his own words, and Giorno finds himself an unwilling audience seeing just how quickly a man can break out in a cold sweat. The answer is very, apparently. "Please tell me that you have a horn."

Bruno nods and Giorno misses the way that his hair would always accentuate his movements, but with his hair pulled back and off his face… Bruno's jaw is surprisingly soft—but maybe the way his bangs and his bob cut his face had a way of making it look sharper than it actually was—and his neck was… quite long, and in the shadow of his chin lay hidden a crop of sunspots. Giorno nearly misses Sticky Fingers zipping _something_ out of the base of Bruno's neck, but only just. The teeth of the zipper follow the line of Bruno's collar bone almost perfectly, which is now entirely visible because his jacket has been opened almost comically wide from the neck down to the keyhole on his chest.

From out of the zipper space on his clavicle Bruno pulls out a ridiculously large cornicello, and it's almost as long as his palm, if not longer. And then the situation gets even more ridiculous, and Sticky Fingers zips out several smaller cornicelli, like some bizarre Matryoshka doll of amulets to ward off the malocchio. Giorno has quite literally never seen anything quite like it, and most likely never will, not unless the other person had a stand a bit like Sticky Fingers, but Mista's face is bright and open and not at all surprised.

Instead Mista shoves both his hands out at Bruno, even though one of them is currently holding a revolver, and he makes grabby hands with exceptional exuberance. "Come on, hand one over."

Bruno himself does not give Mista a horn. Sticky Fingers is the one to put out both their arms, one in Giorno's direction and the other in Mista's, and in their fingers they hold two horns, which are nearly perfect imitations of the large one still in Bruno's palm. Mista snatches it up, looking like there are untold secrets hidden within the horn's red coral body. Giorno takes it with considerably less enthusiasm, and instead turns it over, running a thumb over it's golden cap before turning back to Bruno. Bruno's smile is still lopsided and curled around one cheek, and his dimple is still deep.

Giorno tilts his head in question. "I didn't know that you were… superstitious."

"Why do you think he's so good at handling my tetraphobia?" Mista cuts in, waving his tiny horn like the world's mightiest sword. And to Mista? Maybe it was. "He's got this silver one that he's hiding somewhere that he won't let anyone touch."

Bruno taps his forehead in answer, and his skin peels back with the teeth of another zipper. Inside of that golden shine lies a cornicello made entirely of silver, and an equally silver horned hand, and Giorno only gets a very brief peak before Bruno hides them both with a flick of his wrist that sends the slider of the zipper across his skin.

"The silver one," Bruno says while moving his and Sticky Fingers' arms, "stays with me."

Mista kisses his own personal cornicello with exaggerated care and an exaggerated noise, and then bends down to shove it into the mysterious never ending space of his boots, which clink with the hollow metallic ring of bullets when he wiggles his heel out to make room his new amulet of untold mystical warding power. "Hey, that reminds me—what ever happened to your string of nazars and hamsas?"

Bruno frowns and a deep line forms in the scrunch between his brows. The loss of Bruno's lopsided grin is a great loss indeed. "What do you mean?"

"I mean—uh." Mista's regret is visible in his body, and in the way he clasps both hands together, palm to palm, and in the way he jiggles his legs by keeping his feet on the tips of his toes. "We never found them when we were cleaning out your space above the restaurant. I just—I just remembered it, you know. When you… showed your silver amulets."

Bruno's frown gets deeper. "I suppose that answers that," he says, not answering Mista at all.

Mista's face echoes Bruno's frown. "Answers what?"

"I had always wondered what would happen to the objects left in the zipper space after I died. I had… assumed that they would just fall out, and back into the regular world."

"Oh." Mista's regret is even more palpable, and his legs nearly shake Giorno out of his seat. Giorno feels that regret ever keenly, and not just through Mista's nervous movements, but in the part of him that is still revolving around the church, and what he had stumbled upon after stumbling down the stairs. It had been Giovanna down there, bleeding out. But it could have been Bruno. And there is a world out there where it _was_ Bruno—the world from where Giovanna came. Giorno is… so incredibly glad that he did not come from that world, and for all that he can guess what this alternate self of him must have felt, he hopes that he will never have to actually know those experiences. One Giorno going through that should be enough. He hopes. It's a selfish hope, and it makes him want to turn his head away from the others because of the sharpness of the thought.

And there must be worlds where he had died instead. Maybe even down in that church. But not this one. Because Giovanna had been there instead. Another selfish hope, to put that on his older self. And there… there must have been a world where _he_ _himself _had died. Not just _a_ Giorno Giovanna, but _him_. Or would that even be him at all, if this other Giorno was dead, and he was still alive? Because they would be _another_ Giorno, wouldn't they?

Giorno really does now turn his head away at these thoughts, feeling like he's going round and round in endless circles with no end. And there would be no end, not if he kept trying to chase these useless ideas. Utterly useless, and utterly unhelpful. He shakes his head to try to shake them away.

"—put them away," Bruno says, and it brings Giorno back to the conversation so suddenly he feels the flicker of Gold Experience's concern across his mind. They fall back easily enough when they feel his reassurances.

"'Cos we searched for them, and we could never find them. Kinda felt like I had imagined them, honestly. Since I was the only one that knew about them and all."

Bruno hums. "Remind me to take them out of my desk when we get back to Napoli. You can have them, if you'd like."

Mista's face brightens almost impossibly more. "Of course I'd love them—but your office might need them a little more? I know that Libeccio was never targeted even though it's an open secret that we go there pretty religiously."

"The offer is open. I know where to get more."

"And you'll be telling me where to get these," Mista says with his vibrant enthusiasm. It seemed that no matter the Mista—whether he be thoughtful, nervous, excited…—he was bound to be a Mista in motion, and he proves that through and through by leaning closer to Bruno with an erratic jiggle of his legs. "I've got to check if the place is still around in… in my time."

_My time_. Giorno pulls away from his lingering thoughts, which had touched him much like the sensation of walking through cobwebs, and he pulls towards Mista.

"You make it sound like you expect to leave this world and return to yours."

Mista blinks. And then he blinks some more. "Well… yeah."

Giorno stares. Mista stares back. Mista's eyes remain unfathomably dark, and his hair is remarkably the same color. There are seemingly no secrets to be uncovered in that darkness, nor are there any answers to be unearthed.

Giorno stares some more. "Do you have a plan to return to your world?"

Mista continues to stare back. "Well… no."

"I must admit that I had not thought that far myself." Giovanna says, reminding Giorno that _yes_, there _is_ another of him in the car. Somehow Giorno's focus keeps slipping over Giovanna like water through a cupped palm, and for all that he knows that he cannot hold water he still keeps trying all the same.

Giorno looks out the window on his side to catch one of the signs on the motorway. It seems that they have maybe thirty kilometers left before they reach the city of Bologna. They must have passed by Ferrara not too long ago. They should, perhaps, begin to discuss what they will do once they get into the city proper.

"I guess we've got two big issues to solve before we can go back." Mista says while rubbing one of his palms on the back of his head. His hair is remarkably curly. Giorno had never known what to expect when he had first met Mista, and he had almost anticipated a balding, if not bald, head. The tight dark curls suit Mista well enough though, and Giorno can only assume that the cap the younger sports must either be some fashion statement or an effort to alleviate some phobia, or both. The older Mista, the one with them in the car now, seems to… fill the space in a way that the younger doesn't. Giorno had almost assumed that Mista—the younger Guido, that Mista—was an incredibly open and bohemian sort of individual, but evidently he was not _truly_ that kind of person. Or, not yet, Giorno supposes.

"Which are…?" Bruno prompts. There's an interested glint in his eyes but his lopsided smile has yet to return. Giorno mourns its loss deeply.

Mista puts out the thumb of his right hand before speaking. "First, we've got to travel to the right time. And second," he puts out his pointer finger, "we've got to travel across land. We were in the USA before we got dumped here."

"I suppose I could theoretically zip across that much space," Bruno offers with a contemplative hum. "I've zipped through buildings and earth, but never such large distances as across a sea."

Mista snorts. "And it's not like you can zip through time. Even if we got to Florida we'd still be in two thousand and one. I can't even imagine what that would look like, being able to zip through time and space."

"_You_ can't imagine it? _I_ can't imagine it, and we're talking about my own stand. But it would be convenient though, wouldn't it?"

"Maybe," Giovanna says with a casual wave of his hand in the space over the center console. "Sticky Fingers might be able to answer that desire, were it strong enough. Regardless this is a hypothetical to be discussed at another time. We've maybe twenty minutes until we enter the city and we've yet to talk about what we'll do when we're there."

Giorno hears that aggravating turn signal once again and soon Giovanna is stopping in the shoulder of the motowar. Giorno looks at Bruno. Bruno tilts his head before turning to Giovanna.

"Don't make me repeat myself, Giovanna. We'll not be splitting up."

Giovanna shakes his head. "You've heard my objections to staying together. The stand gravity will inevitably pull others towards us, even if the majority of us were to hide in Coco Jumbo's stand. Putting that aside, we need to decide where we're going next."

Bruno's back to gnawing his lip again. It's a wonder that it hasn't been scarred before all this, what with how frequently he must bite it. "Going directly to Rome is out of the question. And I know that you'd rather we avoid the water but I think the best would be to choose either the Tyrrhenian Sea or the Adriatic. We'd go south from there, and then we would come back up to Rome."

"Anything but the Tyrrhenian," Giovanna says while plucking idly at his jumpsuit. The front is covered in blood, as it had been back in the church. Now that blood has dried, and there is really no saving his outfit.

"That would leave the Adriatic then. We could follow the E45 down and then… acquire a boat and go further south. We won't be able to get back to Napoles though, not from that side. Not unless we went further inland on a detour."

Giovanna looks up from his jumpsuit and it seems to _move_, all by itself, in a rolling wave across his chest. He rolls down the driver side window with a hand behind his back. "If we must be out at sea then I suppose that one will do."

"Do you have something against the Tyrrhenian?" Bruno asks with furrowed brows.

"Oh, not necessarily." Giovanna does not expand on his statement. What he does instead is channel a golden pulse of Requiem's power into his clothes and, amazingly, Giorno watches as the blood picks itself out of the fabric. In a rush tens of hundreds of tiny rust-colored ladybugs start fluttering their wings, and in a moment that is punctuated by the sound of a million pieces of chitinous silk swishing against each other, the ladybugs are up and out of the window in a bizarrely coordinated cloud.

"Won't they… won't they come back?" Giorno tries to ask around his tongue, which seems to be fighting his every word. He can't even—he can do that? Change _molecules_ of something? And with such _precision_?

Giovanna shrugs his shoulders, closing the window in much the same way that he had opened it.

His jumpsuit is white.

* * *

**A/N:** I can hear you asking: did I really just read a chapter that was entirely one conversation? Yes. yes you did. Will I put you through that again? Probably! But not next chapter. Next chapter is the second part of this chapter, and that's when things get Fighty. It was getting kind of long though, and then I saw the last updated date for this fic, and I Felt Bad for n'y'all.

Realistically here's what I'm hoping is going to happen

1.) I post chapter 2 of "Criminal World"

2.) I post chapter 1 of "Garoto de Ipanema", which means nothing to n'y'all b/c it's a new fic

3.) I work on a couple of fics for brugio week 2020

4.) I post chapter 4 Part 2 of "It's Always You"

But I'm a lying liar that lies, and my fic writing schedule and attention goes with the wind. For this fic in particular I was much more interested in hashing out the details of the Rome Arc than I was in actually writing the Emilia-Romagna Arc.

if you'd like to speak to me on discord: GundamGay#9423

if you'd like to join my trans/enby, intersex, &/or aro/ace jjba server, which is really a server I made b/c I was feeling Big LonelyTM in the jjba fandom, and I want to find folx w/ my IDs to talk to. if that sounds interesting to you, hmu: /WbdEqFQ


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